The Project of Me

" If God worked in ways that we could understand, then he wouldn't be an awesome God." -17 year old me May 31, 2009 was the start of a lifetime of learning to trust God with what I cannot control. I had my first ever seizures in the church bathroom on a Sunday morning, was diagnosed with viral encephalitis, and spent 18 days in Children's Hospital. I lived 8 years with no seizures and no complications. But in 2017, I started having seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Today, my seizures are mostly controlled by medication with my last "big" seizure being 3.5 years ago. But epilepsy still forces me to daily trust God with my health and wellbeing. When I read through the posts written by young me on this day throughout the years, there's a part of me that wants to say to that younger version of myself, "Just wait... you have NO idea what's coming." But I think adult me needs to listen to young me instead. Jesus tells us to have childlik...

I recently shared my testimony on my church's "Coffee With" podcast and invite you to  listen here. Read my testimony below or listen to it at the YouTube link below.  (Though it's on YouTube, it is an audio version only.)   My name is Lindsey. I’m a believer in Jesus Christ who struggles with food addiction, sexual immorality, and codependency. I will be talking a lot about codependency and it took me a long time to accept that I struggle with codependency mostly because I was confused about what it really was so I want to take a moment to define it. In short, codependency is when your need for approval or validation allows you to be controlled or manipulated or causes you to control and manipulate others. Another helpful way of thinking about it that I’ve heard is, “Normal behavior just taken too far.” Some common characteristics of codependency are people pleasing, perfectionism, over-functioning to be valued or loved, controlling others, or tolerating mistreatme...

Comfort with being replaceable is confidence in your self-worth. I know that sounds backwards, so let me explain... And let me clarify that to be too comfortable with being replaced might be a sign of a low view of self. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I was helping out with my church's VBS that we were able to hold in person despite everything happening with COVID-19. I had been placed in charge of the missions station which meant I’d done work ahead of time to prepare presentations and crafts for each night. The first night with the kids went pretty well. But afterwards, I was up most of the night with an upset stomach. I was pretty certain it wasn't coronavirus related since it was my only symptom and that symptom was at the bottom of the symptom list, but still… I knew I needed to make a decision on whether I’d be there that night or stay home soon so the director could fill my spot. My conscience began to nag me. I knew the smart and safe thing...

"Just worry about yourself!" Was something I often caught myself calling out to the two year olds in my classroom (prior to Covid-19) when they would try to boss around or tattle on each other. I am quite certain that two year olds and addicts are the most exposed version of human depravity. By our very human nature, sticking to "just worrying about ourselves" is not something that comes easily to us. At the fall of man, when confronted by God himself, both Adam and Eve worried about anyone but themselves and passed the blame, saying what others had done wrong.  Lately, I’ve been struggling more than usual to just worry about myself. I could go on and on telling you all the things that other people have been guilty of doing to me in the past year. And while that hurt is valid, the more important reality is that God did not ask me to deal with my husband's sins, or my parent's sins, my brother's sins, my in-laws sins, my coworkers' sins...

For the past four years now, I've celebrated Mother's Day as a "Dog-Mom." But in my perfectly laid out five year plan for my life, I thought I'd have some human babies by now. In the past couple years, Mother's Day has brought up some strange feelings for me. I still sometimes grieve the alternate direction my life has taken, the loss of my plans along with it, and, silly as it may be, I feel the pressure of the biological clock ticking. At the same time, I am also so relieved that I don't have little ones to care for right now and I can just focus on taking care of myself. I don't know when or if the right time for me to be a mother to human babies will come. But it has had me thinking about the third step in recovery. "We made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God." Celebrate Recovery partners this with a Biblical principle based on the beatitude, "Happy are the meek." They phrase this thirst...

I held off posting about my weight loss for a long time for fear of coming across as “cringe-y.” But lately I have felt that I have a powerful message that needs to be shared… A lot of weight loss stories I hear go something like, "I just got so tired of how I felt and looked so I decided enough was enough and decided to do something about it! So with a lot of hard work and effort through such and such method/program, I've lost X amount of pounds and feel better than ever!" That's not how mine goes.    In April 2019, my life fell apart. My husband's relapse led to a series of events that eventually led to my decision move back in with my parents for a while. I was so overwhelmed by all the chaos in my life that weight loss was the furthest thing from my mind. I continued my poor eating habits as usual thinking, "I'll worry about losing weight when my life settles down a little bit." I avoided scales like the plague so I was surprised t...

As I sit in quarantine at home, I feel at peace- not because the world is at peace or even because my personal world is at peace- but because the past year has taught me how to be okay with feeling out of control. A year ago today, long before anyone suspected the world would turn upside down, my world turned upside down. Around midnight on April 7, 2019, my husband overdosed on the bathroom floor of my hospital room and was medically dead for about seven minutes. Had we not already been in a hospital, he wouldn’t be alive today. Prior to that night, I’d been in denial, believing his addiction wasn’t that bad and he just needed a little help. The events of that night made me realize how out of control things really were. That night led to a series of events that put me in a position where I couldn’t even pretend to be in control anymore. Losing the illusion of control helped me see that I never had any in the first place. But God was and is and forever will be in control. I do...

When I started working on the project of me, I don’t think I even really knew what the project was, how the process worked, or what the end result was supposed to look like. When I started my blog, “The Project of Me,” I envisioned doing a lot of writing about how I was dealing with my husband working through his addiction and how I was learning to trust the Lord with all the crap my husband has handed me in life. But as I got started working on the true project of myself, it became a lot less about the crap my husband had done to me and much more about the crap I had done before God and the freedom he offered me from my sin.  I went to my first Celebrate Recovery meeting on October 21, 2019 and the biggest turn off to me was that everyone there was considered “in recovery” for something- whether it was overeating, eating disorders, codependency, sexual sin, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc., etc., etc. That was fine for everyone there, but I didn’t like the idea of being “in r...

Today, Overdose Awareness Day, is somewhat of a sobering day for me as I read stories associated with #endoverdose and #overdoseawareness. Many of these stories are about addicts who overdosed and died or were injured because of it. But on April 6, 2019, my husband overdosed and medically died but lived. He didn’t live because I discovered him, had Narcan at the ready, and called emergency services. In fact, at the time, I was unaware of how serious his problem really was. I would have been totally unprepared to handle an overdose had it occurred in our home. I can say with almost complete certainty that if he had overdosed at home, he would not have lived. By the grace of God, we were already in the hospital for some scheduled testing for me that week. That’s pretty much the best place to be for something as awful as an overdose to happen. He had been acting strange that week- dosing off easily, acting highly irritable, unable to sit still, sweating a lot, breathing heavily. Bu...