pat loughery

Humility. Like patience, celibacy and the ability to avoid watching reality TV, it’s a wonderful virtue to have attained a measure of, but not the kind of thing you want to learn that you don’t have enough of. Not in the moment of unveiling, anyway.

Apparently my God has decided to dig deeper into this area of my character. That’s what I think is happening, as I’m finding myself in one of the least stable places I have been in for quite a while.

At first it began by my wife and I deciding to join Weight Watchers to help us with the discipline needed to shrink back a bit in size. In my case, I gained a good 15+ pounds during Brogan’s pregnancy, trying to be supportive of Shannon’s need to gain weight in order to be a healthy host for such a hairy young child. Add that to the creep of extra flesh in the years before, and I had not only topped my personal upper bound but also gone out and bought the next size of jeans – relaxed fit to boot – and was threatening to have to do that again.

So we joined WW. Let me tell you, standing in line before the first meeting and preparing to stand on the scale is a dreadful experience. Of course, everybody’s in the same boat and the staff is friendly, but we all know we’re there because we’ve reached a personal limit and are saying, “thanks, but no more”. I weighed in at 207.2, about 37 pounds above where I’d like to be. Strange how just writing that now is a difficult experience – I can mentally justify 30 pounds; 35 is stretching it, but for me 37 is too close to 40 (weird, though; my37 years don’t seem anywhere NEAR 40 years).

Thankfully God has designed the human body to respond quickly and well to any attention, so for both of us our first week of eating sensibly and trying to take the stairs at work resulted in a 5.4 lb loss. In the last 8 weeks of WW class, I’ve seen this again and again – most everybody loses big the first week or two. I think God’s encouraging us in this moment, telling us we can do it if we buckle down.

It slows down of course, but by then you’re hooked and know that it’s possible – it’s actually possible!. i’m down 15.2 pounds now. 22 ish to go. I feel better about how my jeans fit. I spend less time holding my belly and squeezing, tsk-tsking myself emotionally.

The great benefits of WW are that it’s a reasonable system – you eat what you want; you just carefully watch portions and realize the consequences. You can eat egg whites and yogurt and chicken breasts and yogurt if you want, or you can eat Doritos. (well, technically you have a serving target of fruits, veggies and milk, but you get the idea). You just journal what you ate, figure out how much of your daily nutritional intake that stuff represented, and aim at your daily target. Tomorrow you start over again. Screw up today and you forgive yourself and move on. For some that’s easier than others. You keep the long term view in mind. Today and tomorrow are just steps on the path, each weekly weigh-in is just a checkpoint. In the weekly meetings, we celebrate 5lb increments for everybody. Some take the weight off more quickly than others. I’ve found that, despite not wanting public recognition and especially not with cheesy gimmicks, having a bookmark with 3 gold stars on it for having lost 3 5-lb chunks is awesome. My bookmark is in the OT theology book I’m carrying everywhere I go.

The next increment for me is 20 lbs lost, a big number by itself but also the initial goal of 10% of my initial body weight. I’m hoping to hit it in 3 weeks, maybe 4.

Humility comes in batches here. You realize that support helps. You realize that you’re not in this thing alone, that others are around you, cheering you on. Celebrating your victories, encouraging you despite your losses.

So there’s that.

Then, when Brogan was born and we were readjusting, I made the offhanded comment to Shannon that she wasn’t suffering from post partum depression, but I sure seemed to be. I had been tired, cranky, basically just a pain in the butt. Stressed out. I decided to go see a psychiatrist for a professional opinion. Driving to the appointment, I have a running dialogue in my mind: what do I talk about, what do I choose not to share? How open can I be? What needs to remain hidden?

I decide I may as well lay it all out on the table and let Dr. Paddison say what she will.

We meet (I’ve met her several times before, but never when I was the patient), get right down to business, I fill out a ton of questionnaires. Some questions make me wince and wish I didn’t have to answer. I do anyway. We talk professionally, probing several areas. How do I express anger? What is Kaileigh experiencing? What were my parents like? (can’t go to a shrink without this question, right? but it’s necessary, and i get to tell stories). We talk about my alcohol intake in my college years when I was way too crazy and would vent steam by finding glass bottles to shatter in the street. We talk about how if I have a beer a week now it’s a big week, maybe two a night if I’m out with friends or smoking cigars on the back porch talking missional church. We talk about my sleep patterns (a big problem at the moment).

Her diagnosis is of exhaustion caused by insomnia. I cry a little, hearing that. Spot on. Exhausted, me? You mean working in a new job with a mininum 45 min commute, being a dad of two including a newborn, planting a church and working on a master’s are too much? (Good thing I didn’t tell her about the master’s part). We start simply, with lightweight sleeping pills and a recommendation that Shannon and I rotate nights when we get to sleep through. She has other suggestions about lightening the load. Some I take, some I choose to be aware of as risk factors.
It works. After one night in the spare bedroom and seven hours of sleep straight through, I was a different man.

The shaping of a humble man continues, of course. It always will. I could talk about the humbling aspects of a church planting experience – I’m sure I will at some point – or the humbling nature of job interviews and rejections, or a thousand other things.
For now I simply know that I must trust that I will see the goodness of God in the land of the living, and in particular in my own self at the moment.