The Project of Me

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...

"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...

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...

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...