It is so important to have a purpose and that really was driven home to me this past week.
I had a friend pass away that was only 39. She was morbidly obese. I had tried to help her several times, but she had no purpose in her life. She wanted to have kids but couldn’t because of her weight. She loved working with people but was so obese, no one would hire her. So her choice was to stay home, get on disability, play video games and eat more. She gave up on life. As a result, she’s gone.
About two years ago, I tried for the second time to help her. She was about 350 pounds then. I gave her shakes and bars; I outlined an eating plan for her. I talked to her about options she had for food. We talked about just walking down her hallway in her mobile home 5 – 10 times a day to get her moving. She did that for about 2 months and she was looking better and feeling better. But once again, something shifted in her life and she let her “itty bitty committee” take over and she gave up again. Only this time to be even worse. During the past two years she went on to gain another 130 lbs. When she was admitted to ICU 2 weeks ago she weighted 480 lbs. Her lungs had given out, her heart was the size of a basketball and her foot was blue and cold because she was getting no circulation in her leg. She had so many blood clots they couldn’t tell us a number for sure. They tried to help her in ICU at our local hospital but didn’t have anything else they knew to do, so they sent her to Dallas to a bigger hospital they thought maybe could help her. They had to temporarily paralyze her body to move her because they were afraid if she had much movement, she wouldn’t make the trip to the hospital due to the number of clots she had. Because she was so obese, they couldn’t care flight her. They had to send her in an ambulance and send a Care Flight team with her because of their specialization.
She made it through the transfer. They tried several different things on her but nothing worked and she passed away on Monday morning. Her funeral was yesterday. Out of four sisters, she was known as the “fun” one. She loved to laugh, she loved to play with the kids, she loved to challenge others to video games, and she always won!
People around her saw her purpose, but she didn’t see it. She had given up hope. She didn’t have reason to get up in the morning and do something that might cause her some discomfort. Everything was too hard.
Do you know what your purpose is? Do you know what legacy you are leaving in your family? Do you know what people will say about you at your funeral? What keeps you going when it’s hard? When your body hurts from working out? What stops you When someone offers to bring you your favorite cupcakes because you’ve been having a hard few days?
You have to keep your mind focused on your purpose. Yes, exercise hurts. Your muscles get torn down to get rebuilt. Yes, some mornings you might get on the scale and you’ve gained a pound. Does a pound really cause you to have a bad day?
What’s your purpose? Is it big enough? It has to be more than fitting in a certain size clothes or looking a certain way. Because guess what, when you are in that size clothes, you will want to be in a different size. When you look the way you think you want to look, you will decide you want something else to be different. Get a purpose that’s big enough to keep you going when you have temptations to give up! Don’t give up! Keep going! There is someone out there that you are an influence on in life and you might not even realize it. But when you pass away, there will be many people there talking about how you impacted their life. Define your purpose. Share your purpose and keep it in front of you!
