After delivering pizzas for well over a year, you learn to recognize houses and customers. You remember the houses that tip well and the ones that are problems. Then there are the houses that make your skin crawl. Not because of poverty or weird occurrences. No, I’m talking about the houses of those who are border-line morbidly obese. I have nothing against the obese. I am not a specimen of physical fitness myself. I have struggled with my weight since the 3rd grade. I do not like delivering to these houses because I feel like I am enabling their behavior in some way.
One customer comes to mind. Every time I pull up to his house, I feel this uneasy feeling come over me. As I look at the receipt to verify I have the correct address and all the items, I see the number. The number on every delivery receipt stating how many times someone has ordered from Pizza Hut. I do not know by how much it has grown since I was last here but it has increased. He answers the door wearing clothes that have been modified to fit him. He is nice and tips well. But as I leave, I just cannot shake that feeling.
As I think about this, we are all in the same boat. We may not be obese but we each have behaviors that we continue to indulge despite their negative impact upon our lives. And why do we continue in these behaviors? It may be out of fear. We turn to these behaviors to comfort us in times of stress. Other times it is loneliness or depression. So we turn to these behaviors to numb ourselves or to help us forget. But the fear and loneliness will return. The answer is obvious but so often we ignore it, the Spirit of the Living God.
For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead; who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope. And He will yet deliver us … Now He who establishes us with you in Christ and anointed us, is God, who also sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge.
2 Corinthians 1:8-10, 21-22