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...

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...

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...

You’ve likely heard of FOMO- “fear of missing out.” But FOBN- “fear of bad news,” is FOMO’s much less talked about second cousin. Do you suffer from FOBN? Take a minute to reflect on your actions and reactions over the past month- which has been filled with plenty of bad news. How have you handled everything? Maybe you weren’t one of those people buying toilet paper in bulk… but has the thought of your loved ones getting sick consumed you? Are you panicking over the possibility of losing your job? Are you worried about finances? Are you stressed out over the thought of social distancing for another month or your kids not going back to school? Have you been afraid to give or stopped giving entirely to your local church or charity because you’re afraid of what the future holds? In general, do you just feel the doom and gloom setting in? Most of these reactions are what we call “normal” right now because if we’re honest, we’ve accepted the fear of bad news as a normal part of soci...

I think it’s a bit of a shame that we don’t do more to acknowledge the first full day after Jesus’ death, the first Saturday, that first period of waiting. We solemnly acknowledge Friday and the gruesome crucifixion that took place but we celebrate in light of the coming hope that we know Easter Sunday brings. But the first Christians on Easter Sunday did not know what Sunday held for them. Many of them had risked their lives to follow a radical man that was now dead. So for them, Saturday was not just a day in between. It was a full day of grief over the events of the day before, confusion over what God was doing, and fear over what the future held for them. That sounds just a little like how many of us may be spending our days right now. I think we can learn a lesson from those first believers on what to do in times of waiting: Remember God’s promises and trust God’s process. In the waiting, the disciples forgot Jesus’ promises, or prophecies. Though Jesus prophesied that h...

Last September, I found myself in a waiting room for a dentist that I'd never heard of, in an office I had formerly known nothing about, waiting for a lunch break appointment that I’d been penciled in for the night before. I was in desperate need of a root canal and had been for probably a couple months by then but I didn’t have the insurance to cover it. The night before I was in so much pain I was in tears. My mom reached out to a dentist she knew of through work and he got me in right away. As I sat in his waiting room listening to other patients schedule their appointments weeks in advance for dentists they had already met, I couldn’t help but be struck by the oddity of my situation. The other thing that was blatantly obvious to me was that, as awkward as it was to get help from a stranger, this was God’s way taking care of me . The dentist billed my insurance and did the emergency work at no cost to me and then walked me down the hall to the School of Dental Medicine so they...

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...