The Joy of Change
Lars Due-Christensen is one of our senior leaders and the founder of the STEPS course, which he ran successfully for many years in Denmark before coming to London with his wife, Mette.
I wondered how I had ended up here. Fruitlessly, I tried to blame everything and everyone else. This can’t all be my fault, surely?
Standing there, it felt like the numbers on the scales were mocking me. No-one had forced me to buy those scales, just as no-one had forced me to stand there to be hit with the alarming realisation of what I was seeing. Naturally, my first thought was that the scales must be wrong. They must be wrong, right? You get what you pay for and all that. I bet another set of scales would be much kinder. Alas, after having endured the humiliating ritual again on two other devices, I had to accept that my newly purchased tormentor was uncomfortably accurate.
So obviously, this left me with no other option.
I needed to save up to buy more expensive scales that would be better at lying to me. I needed numbers that lied.
Upon further evaluation, I figured this might not actually be the best option after all. I figured that actually it wasn’t just that I wanted the scales to lie to me: I wanted to carry on lying to myself. So I needed to get real. I needed to do something about my weight.
Immediately, I knew that if that were to be possible, three things needed to change:
1. I had to eat less
2. I had to start exercising more
3. I had to get help
In the end, the process of changing my weight was actually fairly straightforward. The most difficult things I’ve had to face in my life have actually been changing how I felt about myself: my lack of self-esteem, my anxieties, my anger, and all the other unpleasant thoughts that had affected me for so long. Reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that for me to fully change, I had to deal with some of these harder truths. In some cases, these were lifelong patterns of behaviour, but by working on them I was eventually able to find the joy in change.
I have found STEPS to be an invaluable tool. It has helped me to find peace with myself, with others, and most importantly, with God. If you find yourself in need of change and want to do something about it, a STEPS course is a safe, relaxed setting where you can think about some of these challenges with the help of other people who are in a similar position to you.