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For over 25 years Proverbs 31 Ministries' mission has been to intersect God's Word in the real, hard places we all struggle with. That's why we started this podcast. Every episode will feature a variety of teachings from president Lysa TerKeurst, staff members or friends of the ministry who can teach you something valuable from their vantage point. We hope that regardless of your age, background or stage of life, it's something you look forward to listening to each month!
Meredith Brock:
Hello, friends. Thanks for tuning in to The Proverbs 31 Ministries Podcast where we share biblical Truth for any girl in any season. I'm your host, Meredith Brock, and I am here with my co-host, Kaley Olson.
Kaley Olson:
Hey, Meredith. OK, I have a question for you as we reveal what we're talking about today. Are you ready?
Meredith Brock:
I'm so ready.
Kaley Olson:
OK. What is something really small that frustrates you, like grinds your gears?
Meredith Brock:
One, saying “grinds your gears” is a funny way to say frustrated, Kaley, but I'll go with it. I know what you're saying.
Kaley Olson:
I say that all the time.
Meredith Brock:
I do not say that.
Kaley Olson:
OK. Well, here’s your new phrase.
Meredith Brock:
But I'm going to let our podcast listeners know, they already know about a little bit of this because maybe they've listened to our previous episodes. Guys, my family does not pick up their bath towels, and it really grinds my gears, as Kaley would say. It really grinds my gears. What about you, Kaley?
Kaley Olson:
The toilet seat being left up. This was primarily because I grew up in a house of ... I had a sister, and so the rule in our house was there was only one man, and so he put the toilet seat down. Well, I married a man who had a brother, and so they didn't really care, and so my mother-in-law just learned to put the toilet seat down. Well, I can't tell you how many times I've fallen in the toilet —
Meredith Brock:
Oh boy.
Kaley Olson:
— Because of the seat situation.
Meredith Brock:
It happens to the best of us.
Kaley Olson:
That's really frustrating. But all these things are kind of like small frustrations that obviously lead into the bigger frustration that we sometimes feel, and that can be with God and what He's doing in our life. Sometimes He works in ways that feel painful to us, and it's hard to see how those seasons are working for our good or why He's allowing something in our life or why He's taken away something in our life. It can be really, really frustrating to live and have to sit in that season. Today, our friend and our fellow staff member Ashley Jackson is going to talk with us about how to deal with those frustrating seasons, and we can't wait for you to listen.
Meredith Brock:
Yeah, it's a fantastic teaching that we don't want you guys to miss out on. But before we jump into her teaching, we wanted to mention that there are two other ways for you to engage with Proverbs 31 audio content. One is through the very popular Therapy & Theology podcast with Lysa TerKeurst, Dr. Joel Muddamalle, [and] Jim Cress; it's awesome. Or the other is through the Encouragement for Today Podcast where we share just shorter, five-minute devotionals every week. We've linked those two shows in the notes below, or you can find them on your very favorite listening platforms.
Kaley Olson:
Yes, and we link so many other things in our show notes, and so it's always helpful to ... just once you finish listening, scroll down to check out other things that we recommend. All right, Meredith, let's jump into our conversation with Ashley.
Meredith Brock:
Well, we are so excited to welcome our friend Ashley Jackson to the show.
Ashley Jackson:
Hi, guys, so excited to be here.
Kaley Olson:
Hey, Ashley, we're so excited to have you too. Well, you are no stranger to the podcast because I know I've pulled you in to co-host sometimes with me, but this is a very special podcast recording because, Ashley, you're sharing a message from your book.
Ashley Jackson:
Yes.
Kaley Olson:
What?! It's amazing. It's called Tired of Trying: How to Hold On to God When You're Frustrated, Fed Up, and Feeling Forgotten. What a message. Meredith and I know what goes into writing a book, and it's no small task, right, Mere? No small task. Basically, Ashley had another baby in the form of 60,000 words, and this deserves celebration. I've linked it for you in the show notes in today's episode if you guys want to grab a copy.
Meredith Brock:
Yeah, it is certainly no small task to write 60,000 understandable words. Ashley, I just am curious; is there anything that surprised you in the book-writing process?
Ashley Jackson:
For sure. I think I was used to writing short-form content on Instagram; it is a lot different, and you realize I don't know how to do that, but one of my favorite quotes is: Be brave enough to be bad at something new.
Kaley Olson:
Oh, that's great.
Meredith Brock:
I love that.
Kaley Olson:
That's great.
Meredith Brock:
I love that.
Ashley Jackson:
That's what I tried to do.
Meredith Brock:
Awesome.
Kaley Olson:
That's amazing. Well, I know, Ashley, whenever we were talking about your book and this message and what we wanted to talk about on the podcast, the idea of feeling frustrated with God as a very real and human experience came up because I don't think we want to admit that we're frustrated because sometimes there's a little bit of shame wrapped up in that, but I think whenever there is shame wrapped up in something or we don't want to talk about something, it’s a great indicator that we should talk about it. I'm so excited for what you're going to share with me, Meredith and our listeners today, so you can take it away.
Ashley Jackson:
All right. Well, I want to start with a question for all of us to consider, and that is have you ever been in a season that is just frustrating, like Kaley was just talking about? I think we all have. Maybe it's just not all the hard things that seem to be happening in your life, which on their own are enough, but maybe even harder, you can't seem to figure out what God is doing in the middle of it all. We get frustrated because we want to get out of this; we want to feel better, but nothing we try seems to work as it has before. Maybe you've prayed, you've read the scripture that you would normally go to, you've sought advice, and yet you still feel unsettled, unsure, and maybe if you're like me, a little unstable. Frustration arises in that space between where we know change needs to happen, but we're clueless and helpless of how to know, how to get there.
If I could see all the listeners right now, maybe I would see some hands raised that they also are in that season or have been, some heads nodding in agreement, and I would be raising mine the highest because I know this so well. It is exhausting, not just physically; it's exhausting deep in our souls. But I've come to realize that sometimes God allows these seasons in our lives on purpose, and sometimes we've asked God to bring growth or change in our lives and what we mean by that is that we want Him to drop it in our lap or put it in our hearts or help us to skip down the path with ease, fully transformed. That's how I wish it was.
Kaley Olson:
Me too.
Ashley Jackson:
But instead, sometimes the way God answers our prayers is through a wrestle with Him. Here's the truth: As Christians, I think it's safe to say we all want growth, but so often when the process begins, we resent the growing pains. We want to be changed, but we don't want to be challenged. We want to have victory, but we don't want any of the battles. Unfortunately, that's just not how the life of faith works. Let me tell you a little bit about my uprooting and wrestling season and how that looked with God. I grew up in California, and I think the immediate thought is something cool, and it was not. Let me set it straight really quickly. I grew up in the desert of California, so you have to imagine those scenes from old westerns with gigantic tumbleweeds blowing through the nothingness, and then you'll have a pretty good picture of what the background of my childhood was.
Needless to say, we had a ton of weeds in our life all the time, and if I learned anything from my dad, it was how to pull weeds because we had a lot of them in our yard. We did not have grass; we had weeds. He taught me that you have to pull them out from the root, you have to dig really deep, you have to grip firmly, and you have to use all of your strength. If you don't take the time and the trouble to dig them out by the root, the weeds will be back in no time. In my frustration season, everything that could go wrong was going wrong. I was battling my mental health like this and having extreme anxiety and depression, and I struggled deeply in my relationships because of this. I wanted people to save me, and I was bitter because I thought they didn't care or they didn't know how. Yet simultaneously I pushed them away, hoping I would keep myself safe. I had two small kids who I stayed home with all day, and we had no car, so I could take them nowhere.
Kaley Olson:
Wow.
Ashley Jackson:
Yeah, and I felt trapped. We could barely make ends meet financially, and my husband lost his job. We moved our entire family in with my parents, and then we lost my father-in-law as soon as we did that. That was just to name a few of the things that just seemed to keep coming and coming, and it felt like we were being beaten by life. I felt as though I couldn't take anymore. Why wasn't God fixing this? If I were honest, it felt personal. I felt disappointed that a God I loved and served for so very long was not making this better for me. But these were the things that God used to start showing me my roots of my weeds and that in order to get them out, just like where I grew up, they were going to have to be from the root, the deepest part, and it was going to take a lot of strength and a lot of work, because I was trying to cut those weeds and make it look pretty. But until I let God address the roots, it was going to constantly keep coming back.
As I moved through this time, I knew I had a hard choice to make. Would I trust Him through it all, or would I let the bitter roots overcome my heart and keep me away from Him? The truth was that I had been through too much with Him at this point and I was in love with Him, that even though I didn't understand why He was allowing it, I decided I had to hang on to Him for dear life. I think that's the beautiful thing about having a relationship with God ... is that you've seen Him be faithful and you've seen Him be trustworthy. When these seasons come into our lives, I hope we have a basis of trust with Him and realize like, I love You too much to not be able to go through this with You even if I don't understand why You're letting it happen.
But as we continued through that hard season, God began to show me that I had these unhealthy roots, and I never would have ever noticed them if I hadn't had to face them because of how hard it was continually. For years, I had spent so much time just performing for God's love and trying to do all the right things, and I wasn't willing to look at unhealthy patterns or lies that I believed because I was too busy; I was too busy doing all these things for the Lord. I didn't realize that there were patterns that were based on lies that were dug deep in there that were causing unhealthy patterns in me and expectations in me that were keeping me stuck. I just wanted people to do, be, and act the way I wanted them to so that my life could run more smoothly.
But if I'm honest, as God began to show me that these roots could no longer stay, I was furious. I didn't want to look at roots; I wanted to be healed, and I wanted to be saved out of this season. Again, I had another choice to make. Would I let God do what He wanted to do in my life regardless of how hard it hurt or how hard it was or how much it hurt? Would I trust Him even when the process felt like it was brutal? I ask you guys too: Have you ever sensed the Lord calling you to address roots in your life? Maybe it's when you finally recognize a pattern in yourself that you know is not healthy, or maybe it's when God slowly begins to reveal things that He's asking you to let go of and trust Him with as you read His Word. I feel like He's very good at that.
We're reading in His Word like, This again, Lord? OK. Maybe He starts to ask us to look at those things, but it hurts too bad, and it feels too confusing and complicated, and so we just choose to run from it instead. Maybe the fear is that if we give God access to these roots that we have long left buried that we might not be able to recover. We've been doing our best to keep these weeds at bay, but maybe this is why we're so tired; maybe this is why we're so frustrated. These roots can take different forms of accusations in our life, things that sound like: You've never been wanted, you will never measure up, you deserve rejection, you will always be overlooked, you will always ... fill in the blank [with] whatever your accusation that you hear most in your head. There's a deep fear that we are in fact way too much but never enough.
These are the things that we believe about ourselves. Never mind that we say all the right things about having our identity in Christ. When we are anchored by our toxic roots, we don't really understand what that even means. It sounds good; it sounds right, but we don't yet know how to truly live that. Until we know how to live it, we will be at the mercy of all those roots and accusations that we have been harboring for years, scared to death that we'll be found out. God comes and He meets us in those places, and we wrestle with Him, and it's through this wrestle that we begin to see what we have yet to recognize. Maybe you know someone else who wrestled with God in Scripture, and that's Jacob. In Genesis 32, Jacob went toe-to-toe with God in an all-night brawl. I always just think this is so surprising that God was like, You know what this guy needs? A wrestle. That's what we're going to do.
I feel like He knows that about me. We see Jacob had decided to leave his father-in-law's home, which he had been living and working in for some time. Without telling him, he leaves, and he's going to return to the homeland where God has called him to. The only problem was that the last time he had been home, he was running for his life from his brother. He had tricked and deceived his brother out of his brother's blessing, and his brother, Esau, was so furious he wanted to kill him, so Jacob ran away. You can read this whole story in Genesis 27. But it's here, in this place where he's running from one bad situation and having to face another, that he's doing his very best to figure out what he's going to do.
He sent messengers to Esau saying, "Thus says your servant Jacob, I have sojourned with Laban and stayed until now. I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, male servants, and female servants. I have sent to tell my lord, in order that I may find favor in your sight" (Genesis 32:4-5). I imagine this was Jacob's way of saying, "Look at me. Look what I have. Look what I have accomplished. Please accept me." But the response back was, "We came to your brother Esau, and he is coming to meet you, and there are four hundred men with him." (Genesis 32:6). I don't think it's hard to imagine that Jacob's response in that moment must have felt so overwhelming. What does it mean? What does that mean he's coming with 400 men? Maybe a palpable anxiety gripped his chest, and he was short of breath. What should he do? What could he do?
The last thing he ever heard from his brother was a death threat, but now he had so much more to lose than just his own life; he has all his family with him and all of these things. Jacob went into strategy mode, protecting, organizing, find[ing] a solution, and maybe the pattern that he had yet to recognize in his life was self-reliance. We then read Jacob's first prayer recorded in God's Word.
It says, "O God of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac, Lᴏʀᴅ, you who said to me, ‘Go back to your country and your relatives, and I will make you prosper,’ I am unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness you have shown your servant. I had only my staff when I crossed this Jordan, but now I have become two camps. Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children. But you have said, ‘I will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.’" (Genesis 32:9-12, NIV). Like Jacob, we bring our desperation and our fear-filled prayers to God as well. When nothing we have tried is working, we can no longer rely on ourselves, and so we finally turn to God, and maybe getting us to this moment was always His purpose.
God doesn't want to punish us for relying on ourselves or for our underlying patterns; He wants to set us free from them. This is our opportunity to acknowledge whatever it is God is asking us to face and to confess that we have come to the end of ourselves. As Jacob did, we too can ask for deliverance and boldly remind God what He has promised us in His Word. After crying out to God, Jacob sent his servants ahead of him, bearing gifts for his brother Esau. After the servants, he sent the wives and the children along with everything else that he had, and that is when we read, "And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day." (Genesis 32:24). God's immediate answer to Jacob's prayer was a wrestle. What can we do when God meets us in these wrestling seasons and begins to show us the roots that need to be unearthed?
The first thing we can do is we can look for the lessons. What is God trying to teach us? What is He asking us to let go of and trust Him for? In my season, I sent a text message to my entire family that was essentially a cry for help. It was all three of my siblings, their spouses and my parents. Not a small group by any means, but I wanted them to save me out of what I was dealing with, and I wanted them to come up with a solution for me because I couldn't come up with my own solution. And not one person responded to me in that time, and it crushed me — not even my own family was willing to help me.
But as I worked through that moment and pain, the Lord began to teach me that I was so mad at other people for not being to me what only He could [be]. I already had a Savior, and it wasn't my family. He wanted me to turn to Him and not them. The pattern I didn't recognize was my wanting and demanding them to save me when they couldn't, and I needed to be broken from that. This was a little life-altering lesson for me. I didn't know how to change that, but I knew He would help me little by little, and He did that. Ask God to [help you] see what He might be doing in your life. What are the lessons that you think He may be teaching you?
The second thing that we can pay attention to is what we're thinking about. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and a Holocaust survivor. In 1942, he and his family were sent to Nazi concentration camps where his parents, brothers and his wife died. Frankl survived but suffered through three years in four camps. But after the war, he reflected on his experience in a book called Man's Search for Meaning. He wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." It's a powerful reminder that we always have a choice to pay attention to what we're thinking. In these seasons of frustration and God revealing us our roots, it is easy to see how resentment can build through how we are allowing ourselves to think about it.
We can choose to think that God is not allowing this to happen to us, but what if He's allowing it to happen for us? When my family didn't text me back that night, I was at my very lowest point. I was so tired of trying, but it was only then that I reached a point where I realized what God had intended all along. I had allowed my mind to be the dumping ground for every garbage lie that the enemy was tossing my way, and I believed each and every single lie as [if] they were truth, which I was constantly seeking evidence from the people and the circumstances around me. It was then that the Lord began to show me how to take my thoughts captive.
The Apostle Paul wrote, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5, NIV). Every thought that comes into our minds can be measured by God's Truth. We do not allow our minds to be the place where all the garbage thoughts are welcome. I still struggle with this to this day; I think we probably all do, and we will work on it till the day we die. But it's something to be so conscious of and that we can remember what Frankl said, that we can choose our attitude or how our thoughts are shaping our attitude, which then actually shapes our entire life experience in any circumstance.
The third thing we can do is we can move in grace. When we came to Christ, we were thankful that God did something on our behalf that we could never do. We know that we stand in that grace, and we would never take credit like, "I totally saved part of myself." No, but somewhere along the way we came to believe that while it was grace that saved us, everything else is up to us. This must be one of the core reasons why we find ourselves so tired of trying, because we're trying so hard to be the version of ourselves we want to be, yet we know ourselves so well that [we know] we are far, far from that. We feel the weight and the pressure as Jacob did to fix everything, and we're frustrated because we cannot do that. But the truth is we were never meant to do things in our own self-effort. Grace is for saving us, but it's also for transforming us.
I realized that I sang about grace, I read about grace, and I nodded in agreement about how amazing grace was, but I didn't really understand grace. It was another root. I began to see that even when I had nothing to give, couldn't perform, and was not an acceptable version of who I thought I should be, Jesus was there loving me still. He was giving me what I knew I didn't deserve and I didn't earn. When we have nothing but broken pieces and God takes them and makes something beautiful out of them, that my friend is grace. We start moving in grace when we see that something in our lives is impossibly broken and we choose to confess that God must do for us what we can't do for ourselves. Our responsibility is to surrender and wait for God to do what only He can. We don't need a savior only once at salvation, like I mentioned before, but today, tomorrow and every day after.
To move in grace means to be like a child who throws up their hands to their father and says, "Save me." Would we dare to choose to let God deal with our roots? Why grapple with Him while He reveals what we have yet to recognize? Why would we do this if He's calling us into this season? Because we are called to be more than we are right now, and this is how we get there. When we hang on to God in our hardest moments, in our root-pulling seasons, we can't always see how God is working things together for our good, but God says that He is working to put things together for our good. It may feel impossible, but when we continue to rely on God's grace and strength, we will see things on the other side of the struggle that we never thought possible.
We accept the invitation to wrestle with God because this is how He has chosen to reveal to us wounds we are denying in the lies we are believing. For anyone who's listening today, keep holding on, friend; there is healing, Truth and unconditional love found at the foot of the cross. When we choose to trust Him, take up our cross, and let Him reveal to us the ways in which we have misplaced our hopes, He is faithful to lavish us with grace that we so desperately need.
Kaley Olson:
So good, Ashley, so good. I mean, when you were talking about the growing up in the desert, it reminded me of in the gospels when Jesus talks about the type of soil that you want to be, and I think sometimes we can equate weeds with really bad soil all the time, because the desert obviously doesn't have great soil. But I grew up in central Mississippi where there's really good soil to plant gardens in, and I'm here to tell everyone that weeds also like really good soil.
Ashley Jackson:
That's good.
Kaley Olson:
I don't think that we can necessarily equate bad roots in our life with being bad soil. That couldn't be further from the truth. If you're feeling like just because I have roots that means I am bad or my soil is bad, I think the enemy sees that as an opportunity to plant things in a season that might be good right now because He wants you to be pulled away from that.
Ashley Jackson:
That's good.
Kaley Olson:
Your soil can still be good if you have roots. I just wanted to say that, if that was freeing for anybody, because I know even watching my dad be a gardener and how much he has to go in his garden and pull weeds constantly so that the good things can grow is a reminder for me that I should always expect weeds in my life. But, Ashley, you mentioned that throughout this process of discovering your roots, you talked about being frustrated with your family, and then God showing you that your root was really looking for other saviors or maybe another root was grace, I think. I think that's a very interesting process for our listeners, because you might find yourself frustrated, but you don't know how to identify what the actual underlying cause is. But I also know that sometimes we have to use different tools or weed killers, depending on the type of weed that is. Do you like this Home Depot gardening lesson we're going in[to] right now?
Ashley Jackson:
I love it. Yes.
Kaley Olson:
But what I want to know though is when He did show you, Hey, you're relying on your family too much to be your savior and I need you to rely on Me, how did that actually become uprooted? What did you replace that with? What did it look like? How long? What was that journey like for you?
Ashley Jackson:
I think that's a good question because I think sometimes we think it's a one-stop-shop answer, and really for all of these things, it's a process and a practice. I would fail continually after that and look to them again. But I knew that the Lord was trying to set me free from also ruining my relationships with them, because they're not Jesus.
Kaley Olson:
That's good.
Ashley Jackson:
I have to let them off the hook for not being able to have all the answers for me. But it was a process. I think it was little by little realizing, OK, I'm going to my mom or my sister for something that I really need to be going to the Lord for, and kind of just practicing that, and not getting it right every time, for sure, but little by little letting the grip go.
Kaley Olson:
Yeah, so you changed your practices and your habits.
Ashley Jackson:
Tried, yes. Little by little, yeah.
Kaley Olson:
That's good.
Meredith Brock:
That actually leads into the question that I had, Ashley, because I think that that's really helpful I think for our listeners to hear. I know it's helpful for me, that it's not this one-and-done thing. God doesn't just say, OK, here's the root, your weed is this, and we're going to yank it out and you're good. Let's move on now.
Ashley Jackson:
I wish.
Meredith Brock:
Right, and so I had written down, early in your teaching you had said this phrase ... All this stuff was kind of hitting at once and you said, "I was hanging on for dear life. I was hanging on to God for dear life," and I had written that down. Then, when you got to that scripture, and you might want to pull it up for me really quick, where Jacob's prayer ... Can you read that really quick?
Ashley Jackson:
Yes.
Meredith Brock:
Would you mind?
Ashley Jackson:
I'll go back to that. He says, "O God of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac, Lᴏʀᴅ, you who said to me, ‘Go back to your country and your relatives, and I will make you prosper,’ I am unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness you have shown your servant. I had only my staff when I crossed this Jordan, but now I have become two camps. Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children. But you have said, ‘I will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.’" (Genesis 32:9-12, NIV).
Meredith Brock:
OK. When you read that, I was like, "Whoa." Everybody, listen to what is in that prayer. He starts with, "God of my fathers," he's saying in his moment of frustration, crisis, and fear, he's stopping and saying, "You are the God of my fathers; this is who you are, God, and I had nothing." He said, "I didn't even have my staff when I came to you."
Ashley Jackson:
That's right.
Meredith Brock:
Recognizing in humility, and then where does he go? Gratitude.
Ashley Jackson:
Yes.
Meredith Brock:
He moves right into this space, he was like, "Look at all ..." Then what he says, "Save me," quite literally. When I heard you say I was hanging on for dear life, I originally wrote down: What did that look like? What did it look like to hang on for dear life? You read that prayer, and I was like, That's what it looks like to hang on for dear life. Then, y'all, Jacob, when he got done praying that prayer, guess what he did? He got up and the fear hit again because after we pray it comes back, right?
Ashley Jackson:
Well, and God came right then and wrestled him.
Meredith Brock:
Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. There was a whole wrestling match in that moment. Ashley, I wanted to ask you, and you kind of answered it with Kaley's question, what did it look like practically when you're looking ... God very clearly said, Girlfriend, your weed is that you're going to your mom, your sister; you're looking for other people to save you, and only I can do that. On a daily basis, because you kind of alluded to it, there would be a moment when you would want to pick up the phone and call your sister. What did you do? What did you do instead of picking up the phone and calling your sister? What did you do when the fear and frustration snuck in again that broke the old habits and helped form new ones?
Ashley Jackson:
Yeah, I think the process for me was really about recognizing what I was thinking. He started really challenging me because I felt like I was in a real spiritual battle and I was being beaten up, and the Lord's like, This starts in your thoughts. If I expected my sister or my mom or whatever it was to change me, it was because I thought that they had the answers that they didn't have. For me it was that ... And what I love about Jacob and God wrestling is that he was left alone; everyone had left him. That is where God met him because that is what God needed to do. In the book, I unpacked this whole wrestling process why God meets us alone, because we cannot depend on other people and sometimes we don't understand we're in this isolated season.
For me, I think that looked practically a little isolating, if I'm honest, and that I felt invisible for a long time. But I somehow knew that it was the grace and the goodness of God that sometimes He doesn't allow all these other people, because I believed He wasn't allowing them, to come save me. It wasn't even so much that I was like, "I'm going to stop doing this." He was like, I will no longer allow this because I am the One that you need. I don't know if that happens for everyone. For me, it felt like a ripping away in a way. He was like, You need to trust me. I need to be the only One. It was literally day by day because we are still in the thick of it; it was so hard and just realizing, "OK, I'm choosing again today," or even sometimes in the moment, I don't know. I need You ... I needed to receive from Him.
Instead of trying to figure it all out, I need to just sit and say, I don't know how to figure this out, but please give me the grace for today, and sometimes that's what we have to get into the minutia of trusting.
Meredith Brock:
Ashley, that's so good. I wrote down another thing that you said at the beginning, and I think this kind of wraps this whole [inaudible] ... it pulls it all together. You had said, "I was frustrated that God wasn't making things better for me." What I wrote down in the midst of you teaching was: Ashley redefined what better was.
Ashley Jackson:
That's good.
Meredith Brock:
And that for you, hearing you process through this and it's convicting for me, is better in the moment sometimes in our human eyes, our temporal eyes, is comfort, comfortable, but God says, Better is more like me. He made you more like Him in this process. He nurtured a greater intimacy with Him in you, and it's beautiful to see. Honestly, we're all the recipients of it. Thank you for being so generous with the really personal lessons that God taught you. You could have kept this locked away in your heart, but you've been generous with your lesson, and I think our listeners and your readers of this great book ... it’s going to bless so many people. I'm just really, really grateful for the message He put in your life and your willingness to share it.
Ashley Jackson:
Thank you. That means a lot. Thank you so much.
Kaley Olson:
Me too. Me too. Meredith, it's rare that we have an author on the show who we also personally know, who you and I can validate we see this in you. Ashley's such an authentic person, which is why we're able to doubly say, "You guys can trust this message." When we say get the book Tired of Trying, get the book; it's great. We're going to link it in the show notes for you guys to grab. Also, Ashley, you have graciously provided a free resource for our listeners called “Disappointed With God” that we've linked as well. This is I think free with an email address.
Ashley Jackson:
Yes.
Kaley Olson:
Can you give us a little sneak peek? What is this resource?
Ashley Jackson:
Yeah, so it's just a way to kind of go through questions with what God says in His Word, something I talk a lot about in the book; I have a whole chapter called “When God Hurts Your Feelings.”
Kaley Olson:
Wow.
Ashley Jackson:
We know that God doesn't do that, because He's perfect, but what about when He chooses not to do something, and what does it look like to grieve what He's chosen not to do? It kind of goes through that process.
Kaley Olson:
That's great.
Meredith Brock:
That's awesome. Where can they get that at, Ashley?
Ashley Jackson:
At my website, AshleyMorganJackson.com.
Kaley Olson:
And in our show notes.
Meredith Brock:
AshleyMorganJackson.com and in our show notes, fans, because this sounds like something we all need.
Ashley Jackson:
I know, right?
Meredith Brock:
All right, I want to make one last little plug for something that I love. Ashley, in her time with us here at Proverbs 31, used to be the community manager of our COMPEL Writers program. Is that right?
Ashley Jackson:
Yeah.
Meredith Brock:
OK. I wanted to take a minute to tell our listeners a little bit about our COMPEL Writers Training program. If you are a writer who needs direction, this is a fantastic place for you to start. COMPEL Writers Training is a monthly membership site, and registration only opens a few times a year, so be sure to check out the link in our show notes to learn more about how you can get connected to COMPEL and maybe start taking your first steps as a writer.
Kaley Olson:
Absolutely. Well, that's all for today, friends. For more audio podcast [inaudible] from Proverbs 31 Ministries, go check out our other two podcasts called Therapy & Theology with Lysa TerKeurst and the Encouragement for Today Podcast. As always, we believe when you know the Truth and live the Truth, it changes everything.