Come As You Are: National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s a week where I feel momentum and kindred energy and conversation around this cause that is so near and dear to my heart, but is so often overlooked the other 51 weeks of the year.

The theme for this year is “Come As You Are.” For me, this phrase is a beautiful invitation and a reminder of a critical truth: We are accepted and loved as we are, without having to clean up our act first. The problem so many of us encounter in our lives, in our faith and in our own recovery is that we feel like we have to make progress and get our acts together BEFORE we are worthy of love, acceptance or help. But that’s not the way it works.

Because of grace, we are invited into our life and relationships as we are. But it doesn’t necessarily mean we should stay there. You may be familiar with the trite yet true idiom, “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you that way.” It is BECAUSE we are loved that we are free to change.

Being free to come as we are also presents a challenge for us to do the work of health and healing and become more of our true selves we were created to be not what the world tells us to be. My hope for all of us is that we will accept the invitation and the challenge to come as we truly are and find the love and grace that is offered to us all, even in the midst of our own shortcomings and imperfections.