Where's the Grace?

I know it's a little strange for this post to follow one about hearing angels singing, but there you have it. I want to know what happened to all the wonderful grace I'd been experiencing. To be quite honest, I'm feeling very tired, lonely, annoyed, impatient, and fat. I decided a few weeks ago to stop putting myself under law in the area of diet and stop obsessing over my body, and the result has been a 10 pound weight gain. This is not helpful! It has been better not weighing myself every 5 minutes all day long, but in the end I'm just living in the illusion that I'm not getting fatter, so I'm confused about the right course of action here.

Do I go back to dieting? I don't know. This is just one huge area of my life that seems untouched by grace, an area I still regularly experience guilt and condemnation, , so much so that when I go try on clothes in a store and look in the mirror I almost start crying such shame comes over me. If any of you men out there have ever told some woman in your life to stop talking about fat, I hope you can muster up a little compassion here! I don't think this is an easy thing to put up on my blog, but I know from experiecne that there are so many women who struggle with this (and some men too!) and I know that I know that God wants to bring me out the other side victorious so I can help others, but for the life of me I can't seem to see much hope right now. And so many other issues come out from this one, this problem of not liking yourself at a gut level (no pun intended hehe).

I guess instinctively I can see there's a demonic element behind this, as well as a defiency in my understanding and experience of truth. My temptation is always, go back to law. "See? This grace stuff doesn't really work, not in the real nitty-gritty stuff of life." I'm really confused. I think that's probably obvious! I have all sorts of pat answers swimming around in my head, but I want power! I want God to stop hiding from me, only showing up once in a while, even if when he does show up it's amazing. I want him every day every day, and for a time I did have him every day! Is the infatuation with grace over now? Can't I have more? The first place my mind goes when I'm not experiencing God the way I really want to is 'what am I doing wrong, or what can I do to get him to come back'. This is counterproductive I know but I don't know what to do, because I know the answer is not in my doing at all.

Well, I think this is getting to be a depressing post. And a confusing one. If anyone has a word for me I'd love to hear it, though in this area I'm really struggling right now, I do want to throw it out there that all in my life is not so bleak! In some ways I feel like a spoiled child even talking about this, God has been so good to me, it's just I'm not satisfied and I know there's more I'm missing...and I know he wants to give me what I'm asking for.