Welcome to the I Witness Podcast. I’m your host, Kelly Jo Wilson, and this is the show for women who struggle to accept their worth but want to embrace their gifts and share their witness for Jesus.
Are you fighting the never-good-enough battle?
Do you want to embrace your unique gifts to share Jesus’s love with the world?
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The goal of this podcast is to encourage and show you ways to witness for Jesus in your character daily. We embrace stories of difficult situations that test faith and discuss the hard challenges of being a woman in this world just trying to follow him. I’m so happy that you’re here for this very first episode.
This is our pilot episode for the I Witness Podcast. I am just so grateful for you to join us today.
This has been a long time coming. God has really been speaking to my heart about setting up this platform for people to share their stories and encourage each other.
Kelly’s Witness
A little background about me, my name is Kelly Jo Wilson. I’m a mom of two wonderful boys, a wife to an amazing husband, a nurse with a master’s degree in nursing education, and a writer. I have been called to pursue this path, and God just plucked me right out of my nursing profession.
I’ve always loved being around people, talking with them, and serving them in any way I can. I really love being a nurse. I miss caring for patients, but when God calls you out of where you are, you have to listen, or he’ll put pressure on you and make you listen.
I’m just trying to follow that call and want to share my quick story with you.
I would like to witness today about some things that I’ve struggled with, and maybe you can relate. When I was young, I always fought body image issues. I was a happy kid, well-liked and well-loved, with lots of friends and a wonderful family.
But I always struggled.
I grew up in an Italian family, you know, where gatherings were always centered around food, which was delicious. When I was younger and then into my early teen years, I was a little on the softer side.
My body was bigger, different, and never-good-enough
I was a teenage girl going through all those changes that we go through, and I just didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. When I went to school one day, I decided not to eat my lunch that day. Then one day turned into a week and a week turned into a month, and before I knew it, the struggle was into a full-blown eating disorder.
I didn’t even know it at the time. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, it was a very concrete kind of thinking that if I wanted to be thinner and prettier, I had to stop eating. It was very simple. My mom took me to a few doctors, and she was a nervous wreck.
Once I realized that it was an issue and it was more than what I really wanted or thought it was, I had to realize that this was a real problem.
I remember talking to one of the doctors and he asked me to describe my normal thinking every day about myself, about food, and what I would do, essentially.
He asked me what started everything and he said how many times a day are you weighing yourself? I told him that I wasn’t, I didn’t weigh myself at all. It was only going on how I looked. I remember him writing that down, so in my teenage mind, I thought that was significant. I thought I should focus on getting better.
A secret battle with unrealistic expectations
I really struggled internally. Anybody with any mental health issues like that, an eating disorder, or any other mental illness, it’s really a secretive disease. It’s a really kind of keeping it to yourself, don’t wanna hurt anybody, don’t wanna bother anybody.
You just want to handle everything on your own. At least, that’s how I felt. So, that kind of thinking really plagued me for most of my life, leading into my young adulthood and even early adult days.
It really fueled that, you’re never good enough, I was never thin enough, never pretty enough. It fueled the unrealistic expectation that I could just never meet. I don’t even know why or how that expectation got set, and it was really difficult.
It led to me making very poor, horrible choices throughout my life. And to not really care about my body, going into this never-enough mindset, and trying to people please all through my adulthood. It really was a struggle internally for a long time.
On the outside, I had a lot of friends, and not many people know or knew. This is the first that I’m really sharing it in the open. When I got older and God brought me to a place of realization, I recognized that food and image weren’t the issues.
In the brokenness, Jesus showed up
It was about control, and that control issue was something I was chasing but I could never get. It wasn’t until Jesus really spoke to me one day and said “You’ve got to stop,” that I made a really drastic change in my life when I heard His words.
I knew exactly what He meant. He meant that I had to stop this never-good-enough, never thin-enough, just always tearing myself down. It was into such a spiral that with every single mistake I made, I spiraled more and more down this web of shame and guilt.
And I knew him, I accepted him into my life when I was very young and always felt his presence and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
But, the more I felt shame and guilt, the more I knew I was unworthy of Him. I didn’t even feel worthy to speak His name. So, I really did not embrace what He teaches us, to rely on Him and come to Him when we are weary and weak. I just didn’t even feel good enough to even talk to Him.
Once He spoke to my heart, I knew that it was time to reevaluate what I was doing in my life. I had a season when I was completely broken down to my core. I had to surrender everything to him. It was a very life-changing moment.
Once I did that, I finally realized that it was never about me being worthy enough to accept Him, be loved by Him, or be good enough to talk to Him.
It was always because He is worthy that I am accepted through God’s grace. And once I realized that’s when I could fully embrace His presence and what He wanted to change inside my heart.
Life was still hard, but He changed me
After that, I had a number of challenges that I’ve gone through in my life, my adult life. It’s not like it completely disappears. Once you finally listen, sometimes you even face challenges that are a little harder.
But all through those challenges, instead of the craving for control, I was able to surrender the control and give it to Him. I really stepped back and let Him work.
I still struggle sometimes to take up my cross and follow Him and give Him that control. It’s, it’s always been my struggle. It probably will always be, but He is with me in the fight.
Reason for this podcast
So, that’s one of the reasons why I started this podcast is that, as women especially, we really struggle. We play all these different roles and we have all these roles in our lives. We are juggling all these balls in the air. It’s really hard to give up control when we have so many things, and we’re just that glue for our families and for all the people in our lives.
We’re trying to live this life for Him. But we especially struggle with guilt, shame, past mistakes, and never-good-enough thinking. I wanted to have this platform for other women and people struggling with that or have struggled in different situations to speak.
To share how their faith was changed and their relationship with God and Jesus changed when they faced those hard times. He brings us through to the other side to see things we would never have seen if we kept going down a certain path.
I initially had the idea for this podcast years ago called I Witness. Just us witnessing, literally writing down and sharing a big notebook across the world, and just kind of a naive. . simple idea.
But, loving technology nowadays, this is a wonderful place to share and get that message out. To share the encouragement of how Jesus works in our lives and how he brings us through really difficult times into a peace that we never would’ve known.
Podcast Overview
I am going to share a couple of details just to give you an overview of what to expect in future episodes and what the podcast can provide for you. One of the reasons to listen to the show is for encouragement and an opportunity to have community with other women struggling with things similar to what you’re struggling with.
I really hope to provide some tools, tips, and different resources for us to embrace that daily walk with Jesus and embrace those times that are really hard
If you are a mom, wife, single woman, or a Christian woman just struggling to see yourself as a capable, beautiful, worthy daughter in Jesus. If you fight that never-good-enough battle in your mind and wonder what unique gifts you can share in witnessing for him every day are, then this podcast is for you.
I hope this will encourage you and empower you to live your purpose for Him, that He’s calling you to live.
Future episodes will be some solo episodes. A devotional style, sharing devotional stories, resources for you, and recommendations that can help, depending on what topic we’re talking about for that day.
It’s also an interview-style podcast that will have people on with really compelling stories of faith in hard situations to show us how God works in our lives and to share that encouragement with one another.
How to subscribe to the podcast
If you want to subscribe to the podcast, you can open your smartphone. It will have a podcast app built in, whether it’s through Google, Apple, Android, or you can use Spotify or any other different kind of podcast app.
You can click in your podcast app and search for I Witness. If you click the button to subscribe right in the app, that would be fantastic.
Here is a link to the page for the I Witness podcast if you’d like to visit and choose your favorite podcast app to subscribe.
I just wanted to give you a quick overview and share my story. I appreciate you so much for listening today. Just hit that subscribe button in your podcast app so you can be notified of new episodes.
I hope that you have a wonderful day, and thank you so much for listening.
If you or anyone you love struggles with an eating disorder, please click here for support through the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA). “Eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate of all mental health disorders, surpassed only by opioid addiction.”- NEDA
