Ashley Morgan Jackson Quotes

An identity built on something that cannot survive a change in circumstances is an identity that will not stand the test of time. When we hit a hard season, it will fail us.

God knows we don’t understand, but He never stops loving us, even when we can’t hear Him or we choose not to believe Him. Our ability to receive the love of God is not a prerequisite for Him loving us. When we are brave enough to be still, God breaks through our self-protective walls and speaks truth into our disappointment with Him. His whispers are tender and faithful.

Since the beginning of time, God has been dealing with people just like us who are flawed, insecure, and sinful. That is exactly why He sent Jesus to be for us what we never could be for ourselves. Friend, maybe you are tired of trying because God wants you to recognize you don’t need to keep trying. Instead of trying to fix things by being strong enough, good enough, and smart enough, God wants you to stop relying on yourself and your own efforts. Maybe tired of trying is exactly where God needs you to be because it’s the only way to get you to face whatever it is you’re trying very hard not to face.

As much as it might hurt to hear, I think deep down we all know that God’s number one goal in our lives is not to give us what we want, but to make us more like Christ. And one of the ways that happens is when we make choices that aren’t always easy. Forgiving when we want to hold on to bitterness and resentment. Walking by faith and not by our feelings. Loving people, even when we might not like them. Laying down our rights so we can take up God’s righteousness. It’s not an easy truth to accept, and it feels especially harsh when we can’t see how the hard season we are walking through could possibly be God’s best for us. But in the middle of the pain of a no from God, it helps to remember someone else who had to endure the pain of a no.

It was during this time that God began to ask many probing questions. Why the anger? Why the anxiety? Why the bitterness? Why the busyness? Why the striving? Why the insecurity? Ashley, what’s at the root of all this? I was desperately afraid that I was not good enough. I was anxious because I didn’t know how to make things better and afraid they were going to get worse. I was bitter because I wanted to be better than I was. I had always considered myself to be strong, and I wanted to be strong again. I stayed busy in the hope that other people would tell me I had value and my life did matter. I lived insecure because no matter what I tried, it failed to give me the validation I needed. I wanted to be good enough, and all I had was proof that I wasn’t. The pain of this realization and the way it made me feel exposed was a threat to every ounce of who I was. It was like having an exposed nerve—all I wanted was to escape this excruciating pain. God asked me these questions and gave me time and space to wrestle through them until I could acknowledge the sources of identity I was relying on that were not Him. It would have been unfaithful and unloving of God to let me continue relying on those idols when what I really needed was Him. What about you? What reactions have you been living with that might be an indicator of the questions God wants to ask you? He doesn’t point them out to shame us but to set us free. We are often so tired and angry with others because we are asking them to give to us what only God can. When these questions trigger emotion or reveal where we may have gotten stuck along the way, we have a choice to make. We can either face the truth of our hurts and let God uproot what needs to be uprooted and replace it with truth, love, and freedom, or we can hold on to our hurts and continue wrestling with Him for control. I wanted to let go. I wanted to let Him validate me, but I didn’t know how. When we have lived in certain patterns of behavior that we believe keep us safe, nothing can be scarier than being exposed over and over to our true need.

I’ve grown most not from victories, but setbacks. If winning is God’s reward, then losing is how he teaches us. SERENA WILLIAMS,

It may feel weird at first, but speaking biblical truth out loud when we experience doubt and disappointment is an essential practice during any wrestle. The apostle Paul wrote, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). We must routinely speak God’s words to ourselves so that truth begins to replace the lies of the old tapes that run on repeat in our minds. Perhaps you can relate to some of these lies: I can’t believe God let this happen. God must not love me. Why is my life such a mess? This could never turn out well. I will never have enough strength to do this. I am too tired of trying. To practice truth, we craft statements based on God’s Word. That’s how we speak truth over our lives. Here are some examples: God deeply loves me, even when He says no. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:6-7). My story is not over. God is not finished, and He will bring beauty from ashes. “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Even in what I am facing, I am still blessed. I don’t have to be strong because God will be my strength. “The LORD is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Exodus 15:2, NIV).

This is exactly what I did when God began to ask me to surrender and to change my inner dialogue to confront my thoughts of disappointment with Him. Whenever I started to have mean, discouraging thoughts or lies that I didn’t want to have in my head, I began saying out loud, “I love you.” The lie I believed: “You are a burden.” The truth I replaced it with: “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17, emphasis added). “I love you, Ash.” The lie I believed: “God must be punishing me.” The truth I replaced it with: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18, emphasis added). “I love you, Ash.” Saying these truths out loud was a thought pattern interrupter. I was telling my brain, “Don’t think that,” by putting up a roadblock that kept my thoughts from continuing down that dark path. And I felt like every time I said, “I love you, Ash,” out loud, it was God’s reminder that He loved me, He was fighting for me, and together we were going to get through this.

I still say, “I love you, Ash,” to this day, and when my family hears me say it when I am off in a corner by myself, they always respond, “Love you too.” It might be a little odd, but it works. Try saying, “I love you,” or choose your own word or phrase when you need a thought pattern interrupter. The point is to be proactive about replacing misguided thoughts with simple but powerful truths. What we think leads to actions, actions lead to patterns, and patterns dictate our lives; so this is not something we can take lightly. This is an action step we can take as we learn to surrender—to hold on to God but let go of outcomes.

Our culture has trained us to perform for validation and acceptance. That’s why so many of us are tempted every day to post something on social media—we crave immediate affirmation in the form of likes and follows. Am I good enough? Do you like me? Validate me, please. When God no longer allows us to run to these false sources of identity to bring us security and worth, He does so to set us free, even though it hurts. We cannot continue to rely on these sources to tell us who we truly are and to give us what we truly need. God loves us and calls us worthy because we are His children.

I am constantly thinking about how I can’t control what others think of me, but I can control what I think. If they choose to hate me, judge me, or criticize me—well, that is their problem and their issue. I am aware that my own issues are big enough to fill my hands without having to control or worry about other people’s issues too.

I can choose to believe God, to be kinder to myself, to be brave, and to no longer be controlled by guilt or fear. I can choose to stand up in who I am, in who God says I am, and to take the time to figure out who that is.

I am making different choices now. I have a perspective and an understanding that I didn’t have before. Slowly, I will become who God says I am. I will let go of who I think I am supposed to be and just be me. I will find a way to love myself even when I am not perfect. I can work toward being a better me in mind, body, and spirit—not by hating myself into perfection, but by loving myself into progress. This is how God works with me—with all of us. And I will honor Him by doing the same. Glorify yourself through my healing, Lord. And friend, He did.

What my Savior had been gently whispering to me at this stage of my journey was this: Stop pretending, Ashley. Stop pretending to have it all together, to be okay when you’re not. Stop getting others to tell you your worth and striving for others to recognize your value. I am the only one who can give you those things—and I want to.

I also needed to stop trying to do things for God—to earn His acceptance, to be worthy of His love. I knew He wanted me to truly believe deep down that He loved me simply because I was His daughter, not because of what I could do for Him. I was exhausted because I had been trying for too long to be my own savior, and that was never God’s intent. I had relied on self-effort to be good enough when that is exactly what Jesus had died to set me free from.

I knew the truth of all this in my head but not yet in my heart. I wanted to need Him. I wanted to truly believe that nothing was better than Jesus—that no one else could save me, love me, or give me my identity. I wanted Him to be life to me. I wanted to know what it meant to feel His great redemption—not logically or on paper, but in my heart because I had experienced it. And maybe that was what I was finally beginning to experience now. Stop pretending, Ashley. I knew He was inviting me to a new and deeper place. It was an invitation to walk with Him through these hard choices I faced. Would I dare to let go of my need to perform and my need to live up to who I thought I was supposed to be? Could I recognize that I was still trying to prove to Him and to everyone else that I was worthy of His love? Could I learn what it meant to accept His love even when I felt least deserving of it? Through the hopelessness and the brokenness, I didn’t understand what all of this might mean, but He did. It would mean letting go of everything else. He needed to be my only option. No matter what, He needed to be enough.

And yet, we long for someone to really want to know how we are. Because the truth is, we’re not good and we’re not fine. We are desperate to be saved out of this place that God has asked us to walk through.

Maybe part of feeling tired of trying is that on some level, we believe we have to try in order to be loved. When there is no strength left and we feel like a broken mess, we wonder what there could possibly be about us that God would want. We don’t want to live like this, and other people seem to be overwhelmed by the broken record of pain that has become our lives, so we just assume God feels the same way. Our souls can’t help but cry out, “How is this love? How can this be the way God wants my life to be?” Standing with empty hands and nothing but broken pieces of our former selves, we have important questions that need to be answered: Does anyone see me? Am I valuable? Am I worthy? Does anyone really love me, unconditionally? And we’re scared to death that the answer to all those questions is “No!” But we keep asking because we are made to seek answers. We ask our families, our friends, our churches, our leaders, and even social media. We perform for validation—for love—by trying harder, saying the right things, and playing the parts that have always brought the applause and approval our souls crave. But even when the people in our lives try to answer these questions for us, the answers never seem to be enough to make us feel seen, valuable, worthy, and loved. Every attempt slips quickly through our needy souls like sand in a sieve. God is the only one who can answer our questions and give us the validation we seek, but we’re not always on speaking terms with God when we feel like He has hurt our feelings. Even so, that doesn’t keep God from trying to get through to us.

You are not an inconvenience to God, and He is not annoyed when you feel fearful, fed up, and forgotten.

We may be invited to wrestle when we are grappling with a loss, a struggle, or feeling stuck. Wrestling might be the choice we have to make when we face the death of a dream, buckle under the weight of a long-carried grief, or feel overlooked and left behind. Or we may have to hold on to God in the face of something we never saw coming—a crisis that became a constant burden and is now our daily life, an unexpected broken heart, or a wait that never seems to end.

The kind of wrestle that God invites us to is not easy or quick. It requires us to continue to bring our hearts to God as we navigate the painful chasm between how life was supposed to be and how it is. But this wrestling has a purpose. God never requires anything from us that is not for our good, for the outworking of His Kingdom, and for the glory of His name. We may know the following promise well, but it’s especially important to remember it when we’re wrestling: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). When we enter a wrestling season, we just have to keep holding on to see Him do that work. What does it look like to keep holding on? Jacob’s story shows us. Although he was tired of trying, Jacob was also determined to receive a blessing from the one who met him in his struggle. Scripture describes Jacob’s wrestle in just six verses: So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. GENESIS 32:24-29, NIV

After a long, dark night of struggling with God and holding on to Him, Jacob emerged with a limp but also with a new identity, a new future, and God’s promised blessing. Jacob’s struggle with God had a purpose; it was a transformation process God designed for Jacob’s good. There are many lessons we can learn from Jacob as we enter into our own seasons of wrestling, including how to let go of who we thought we were and how life was supposed to go according to our plan. As Jacob did, we, too, can make the hard choices to engage God, to learn through our struggles with God, and to experience the freedom and blessing that come from surrendering to God’s way.

My identity as the “good Christian girl” had become a well-crafted idol, and God was patiently helping me to both recognize that and to let go of it. My heart to serve and do the right things was not bad or wrong. The problem was my need for those I served and admired to respond the way I needed them to for me to feel okay. God was showing me that I was enslaved to the awful taskmasters of performing for God and earning other people’s approval. I loved this idol. I lived for this idol. And now, I was dying by this idol—a slow, painful, bitter death of rejection and disapproval. I thought if others wouldn’t accept me as broken (because that was all I was), then all I was left with was hate. I hated them, hated me, hated my life and my circumstances. God allowed me to feel the brokenness and the bitterness so I could see how skewed and weak my misplaced identity really was.