Touched by grace, renewed by prayer

Nine-year-old girls are often happy and carefree, aren’t they? They know they are as beautiful as any princess in a fairytale, because their parents tell them so. They feel reassured and protected in their tender, needful lives – playing with Barbie dolls, taking dance lessons, picking flowers, laughing, dressing up and dreaming of the future.

They don’t shrivel inside pink pajamas, they don’t stand naked before a mirror, counting their ribs and sucking in their cheeks. They don’t deny themselves jam on toast, then margarine, and then bread. They don’t stop eating altogether.

Yet please don’t tell Emily Wierenga this, please don’t tell her what a nine-year-old is or isn’t like.

Please don’t even tell her how young nine is. For when she was nine, this pastor’s daughter from a home-schooling heritage, this sensitive child felt very, very old, carrying the responsibility of being the eldest of four.

She didn’t see a sweet princess in the mirror. She didn’t see someone she could love and nourish. She saw only a big-boned, overweight person, who had no say in her life.

She knew she was loved, she heard the words, but didn’t feel them, growing up in a silent and nomadic household where father was very busy and mother very private.

And so in her controlled environment, she clung to something she could control: how much food to put inside her body. Daily she counted calories, often through tear-filled eyes as she wondered whether being thin and beautiful would mean more time with Dad.

Sagging pants, loose shirts, eyes big, face slim … these were things that brought joy amid pain.

Starved of attention, she starved herself for four years, almost to death.

She vividly recalls an autumn day in 1993 when she lay shivering on a metal hospital bed, her 13-year-old anorexic body wasted to 60 pounds. Nurses hovered under fluorescent lights while she hovered between life and death.

How did she survive?

“It was a miracle of God that saved me,” she says, remembering how faith entered her heart and pulled her from the void. “The nurses thought I should be dead. I was a breach of science.”

Still faith tugged and tugged, pulling her towards the joys of marriage, motherhood, writing, art and playing music, skills she practices today at her Neerlandia home.

It hasn’t been easy – far from it – and there was a period in her mid-20s when she fell heavily again into the anorexia abyss, yet through God’s grace she rediscovered salvation.

Wierenga has retraced the footsteps of her journey in her latest book “Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder,” which has received fantastic reviews and is number one in Pastoral Counselling Books on Amazon.ca.

As the title suggests, she hopes her testimony will provide a signpost to recovery for someone undergoing a similar trauma, not necessarily an eating disorder.

She hopes to inspire a vision of life’s potential beyond the disorder.

The book includes perspectives of those with a disorder and family and friends; insights and observations by medical professionals, advice on what to do and not to do if you’ re trying to get help; and prayers.

Wierenga said her parents, siblings and husband shared their hurts and memories with a humility, openness and spirit of forgiveness that profoundly moved her. They helped rebuild her confidence as she began to see the destruction wrought by her behaviour.

Sadly, her story is not uncommon. As she points out in her book, “Recent surveys indicated that four out of five ten-year-old American girls have been on a diet; and children as young as six are dieting. Many seven-year-old girls are refusing to eat birthday cake because it contains too many calories.”

And it is not just girls who suffer. Anorexia also hit males, as shown by Andrew’s story in Chapter 22 of Chasing Silhouettes. Andrew believes his illness stemmed from an identity crisis as a teenager when he got into cycling and yearned to look like the pro-cyclists he saw in photos.

How many other young men suffer in silence? Hopefully, Chasing Silhouettes will shine a light on a problem that too often festers untreated.

Wierenga has several other literary projects on the go, including Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy, co-written with Dr. Dena Cabrera, which is coming out through Rowman &Littlefield Publishers on Mother’s Day 2013, and A Promise in Pieces, part of Abingdon Fiction’s Quilts of Love Series, being released in fall 2013.

Books have played a huge role in Wierenga’s life. An avid reader as a child, she found friends in novels until she started attending public school in grade five.

Now she hopes her own writing will come alive for fellow sufferers, helping them find a path to recovery.

She aches for those that long to cry out to God, yet don’t have the words. Perhaps they can find them in Chasing Silhouettes.

“Please use them, until you find your own,” she says.

People can buy Chasing Silhouettes at Amazon.ca and Fyfe’s. The book was published by Ampelon Publishing (www.chasingsilhouettes.com) on Sept. 25, 2012. Bestselling author Dr. Gregory Jantz wrote the foreword. The book sold out five times on Amazon in its first month and is receiving rave reviews.