Karen S

All my life I’ve had a problem with food. I remember my mum crying when I was really little because I wasn’t eating enough.

When I was 14 my father left. It wasn’t an acrimonious divorce, and at the time I didn’t think it was affecting me much. I know now, of course, why I was always seeking out older boyfriends - to try to replace what I’d lost. I was dumped by boys over and over again, and each time I used food to comfort me.

At 17 I found a new boyfriend and this time we stayed together. We were still together when I reached 30, and I became pregnant. When I was 38 weeks pregnant we went to visit a friend – I was too big to drive, so my boyfriend did the driving. He said he had to go and do something, and he would be back to pick me up from my friend’s house in a couple of hours. He didn’t come. My friend drove me home, where we found that my boyfriend had taken suitcases and most of his possessions. He had decided that he didn’t want to be a father after all, and that was the end of our relationship.

After my baby Natalie was born, the eating got much, much worse. I found it comforting to binge but even as I was doing it I knew I would have to starve later on to get thin again. I was deliberately harming myself, but I couldn’t stop. It was as if I needed to punish myself for being rejected by my boyfriend.

When Natalie was three years old, I began fostering children for the local authority. By the time I stopped this work I’d had seventeen different children living with me before they moved on. It had seemed like a good thing to do, but I didn’t realise that as I said goodbye to each child for the last time I was being left – again. I was the suffering cumulative loss of child after child.

When Natalie was four, I met the man who became my husband. Looking back, I can see that the healing that God has done in my life started with this relationship. I know that my husband loves me and will never leave me. I was still struggling to keep my eating under control; for my husband’s sake I desperately wanted it not to be a problem, so I just hid it from him. He never mentioned it. I think he didn’t know how to help me, so he just turned a blind eye and hoped for the best.

At about this time, a miracle happened. We both found faith that God is real, that he loves us, and that he sent Jesus to die for us. We became Christians and joined a new local church that had just been planted by St Barnabas

As for my eating disorder, and whatever underlying problems were causing it, I had a clear picture of how God was getting involved. It was as if I was falling down a deep well, but when I allowed God into my life, he stopped me just before I hit the water. Then he put a rock under my feet. He didn’t take me out of the well; I wasn’t ready for that. He just made me stable, and comfortable. It was as if he lowered two armchairs down into the well, one for me and one for Jesus! I was still in the throes of the disorder but I was not alone in it.

Two years later I started to feel ready to deal with this problem, to try to escape the well of my eating problems. Of course, it’s very difficult to climb out of a well by yourself. I began crying out to God; I became increasingly desperate to be free of this illness that was with me all the time. I knew I was not functioning properly. I also knew that although God was with me and loved me, I could not trust him enough to give it up.

Finally, in prayer, I heard God answer me. He told me that he was going to turn the well into a tower, and place me on top. It was a promise of healing, but it was more than I’d asked for – not just to escape but to end up in a better place than I could have imagined.

At about that time a woman at St Barnabas told me that she had had the same problem, and that God had healed her. I was surprised by her story of how it had happened. She’d had prayer for ‘deliverance’ – that is, someone had prayed for a spirit to leave her, and when it did, her eating problems went away.

‘Could I need deliverance?’ I thought. ‘Is there an evil spirit influencing the way I feel about food and eating?’

My friend said I should simply ask God if there was a spirit I needed to be delivered from, and so I did. Nobody knew what I was praying for, and in fact not many people knew about the eating problem since I’d kept it so secret. But when someone was praying for me a few days later she said ‘I feel you have a spirit of abandonment.’

That made sense to me – that a malevolent spirit was capitalising on the desertion of my father, the desertion of my baby’s father, and the departure of the children I’d fostered, making me feel rejected and deserving of abandonment. In the same meeting God spoke to me though people with lots of affirmation, telling me he loved me, and that to him I was beautiful. God’s ways, and his character, are so different to what we know as human beings. Where I had felt rejected and worthless, God was telling me the opposite.

Two weeks ago I was at the church women’s group which meets in my home on a Thursday evening. By that time I was in despair. My eating habits were awful. Even though I had God’s promise about the tower, so I knew deep down that he was going to heal me, I couldn’t see how. I didn’t feel like sharing the problem with the group, either; it didn’t feel like the right place to talk about it.

However, someone brought the subject up and we began discussing eating disorders. At the same time, I became aware of a horrible presence. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I heard a voice saying, ‘It won’t work. You can’t do this.’ All I could look at in the room was a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. I turned to another woman in the group and said, ‘I can hear this voice,’ and told her what was going on. It was as if the thing that had been controlling me was here, now.

‘We have to pray now,’ said my friend. She prayed for me there and then, telling the spirit of abandonment to leave. I could sense God’s presence in a gentle way, but nothing dramatic seemed to happen.

The friend who had spoken to me about deliverance had also said, ‘Ask God for something to replace what you are giving up.’

Something I have wanted since becoming a Christian is to really hear God’s voice. My pastor once said, ‘You have God’s ear,’ and it was true in a limited way, but I really wanted to hear more. I told God that I would hand over my eating problem to him, and really give it up, and I asked him if he would replace it with the gift of prophecy.*

Eventually the meeting ended and people went home. I wondered if I was any different. I knew I was when, instead of eating the biscuits that were left over as I always do, I put them away.

On Sunday I went to the church meeting as usual – but it was completely different. All day, God was speaking to me! It was like having someone at the other end of the phone. On ten separate occasions he said the words to me, ‘I will never leave you.’ He gave me a message for the people of the church, that he had great plans for them. On the way home in the car a friend I was giving a lift to was talking about a problem she couldn’t see her way out of. God said to me, ‘She needs a spirit of forgiveness.’ I just said it to her straight away and she burst into tears. She knew it was true.

One Sunday two weeks later was the day I really knew for sure it was done. I’m healed. Someone gave me a box of chocolates. I ate one, didn’t fancy the rest, and put the box away.

Six months later, Karen is still not experiencing problems with eating. She is continually learning new things about enjoying food in a healthy way, and has lost a stone in weight without trying to diet as a result of better eating habits.