The Goodness of Limits

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, this is John Rustin, President of NC Family and we're grateful to have you with us for this week's program. It's our prayer that you will be informed, encouraged, and inspired by what you hear on Family Policy Matters and that you will feel better equipped to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here is our host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy Devitt Griggs.

Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. We all know as believers in Christ that our lives are supposed to be marked by joy and purpose as we rest in Him. Well, do you feel like your life is full of purpose, joy, and rest?

Well, that's a tough thing to achieve, isn't it? Especially at certain times of our lives. Well, Dr. Ashley Hales is here to talk to us today about this very thing. As a mom, a pastor's wife, and an author, Dr. Hales can certainly understand the lure of busyness that's constantly pulling on our lives. She's just finished writing a book entitled, A Spacious Life, Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limitations, and she's here to share some of what she's learned.

Dr. Ashley Hales, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thanks so much for having me. All right, start off by explaining, what do you mean by a spacious life? I love the verse, Psalm 18, where the psalmist says, He brought me out into a spacious place.

He rescued me because He delighted in me. And I think so much of us are looking for that sort of spacious place that God would lead us beside still waters and green pastures. And yet we tend to think that that spacious place is dependent upon our circumstances rather than dependent on our relationship with God. Talk about how we achieve this.

I've listened to your podcasts. You talk about embracing life's limits as invitations. What do you mean by that? Unfortunately, so much of what we have kind of learned by birthright in much of the Western world is that our limits are something that we need to either control or we ignore them or we push them off or we try to, you know, work past our limits. Our limits we think of as barriers, but really our limits, the normal God given natural human limits that we all have are actually invitations to knowing God.

And in the book, I talk about Jesus, who is both fully God and fully man. So he had human limits and each of his limits are also an invitation to us to press into who God says we are and to begin to kind of slough off this. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, keep hustling, keep hurrying, you know, that spacious place that I long for.

It's going to happen one day in the future or once I get a promotion or when I'm on vacation. And actually, once we see our limits as invitations, then we can find that sort of spacious place growing inside of us, even when our circumstances are not ideal. You know, I think of Paul, he talks about he has learned the secret of being content and lots of his letters were written, of course, in jail and in prison. And so that contentment that we all long for, it can't be based circumstantially. Our limits are actually an invitation into that sort of contentment that Paul talks about. That's a wonderful example about Paul. But can you also give us a today example of that?

A modern example? You know, one thing I've noticed is as I have chosen as much as possible to create margin space in my calendar, that that has been one thing that actually brought a lot more peace. I think it's easy to say, OK, yes, I'll sign up for all the volunteer opportunities at church. I'll take my kids to all the extracurricular activities and to choose to put limits on our time so that we can actually enact our values.

You know, whether it's eating dinner around the table as a family or as a family or individuals, we're going to go and do this sort of mercy ministry activity or just getting to know our neighbors and practicing hospitality. Once we actually put limits on some of the things like time or our use of social media, we find that there's an actual piece that grows. So you're talking about saying no here, aren't you? And that's a really difficult thing, isn't it, for a lot of people?

Yes, it is. And, you know, even to besides even us just saying no is to learn how to accept the no of God is another kind of way in which we choose to say that my life is not my own. And all of our little small deaths to self can also be ways in which we are pressing into the limits of our actual lives, not as something to get angry about or to fight, but to actually say, hey, Jesus, would you be in this with me? So are there some habits or disciplines that help you? I guess I'm wondering when you find time to write a book. You're a mom, you're a pastor's wife.

Are you an early riser or what's the key to that for you? Yeah, you know, a lot of this book got rewritten during the pandemic. And some of that was our children were all home and we were homeschooling them.

And so a lot of it happens in early mornings or my husband would take them out for a long hike and I get a few hours worth of work in. But, you know, also just realizing that sometimes our limits mean that other people are implicated. So I ended up turning the book in late.

And I think probably there was a lot of mess ups with how publishers had hoped books would go given the COVID-19 crisis. And yet just realizing that our limits, they don't bar us from community, but they actually encourage other people to help carry that load for us. And we can ask for help. I love that. I love that idea that if you think you're going to do it all, if you try to do it all, you're not leaving room for others. And so that's a great point. So you mentioned how important rest was, and I don't think you use the term practicing rest, but it sounded somewhat like that. Why is it important for us to consider rest kind of a discipline in our lives? Well, you know, I love that when Jesus was baptized, the audible voice of God the Father says, you're my son.

I love you. And telling other folks, listen to him. And before he's done anything, he already has the pleasure of his father. And it's from that place that we rest. There's so much to in the creation of the world in Genesis 1 where we actually, the day starts in the night, the day starts in rest where we're vulnerable and that we don't actually have any ability to earn our rest.

And often I think we in America, we try to work really hard and then we collapse. And so we cycle between cycles of production and then escape. And the gift of rest is something that is so transformative to actually say, just like Jesus is called Beloved, we are also given rest first, and it's from that rest that we're able to work. And so even practicing the discipline of a weekly Sabbath, maybe we turn off screens.

In my family, we have dessert, we want it to be celebratory. But these are the sorts of activities that remind us that our primary identity as God's child. And so we get to rest. I mean, Jesus rests on a boat in the middle of a storm, he doesn't have anything to prove and really, we don't have anything to prove by our work either. And so practicing rest, putting away your phone, maybe plug it in the kitchen at eight o'clock at night, you're not on screens until midnight, take a bath or read a book or, you know, do something that's delightful so that you can actually sleep. Because ultimately, those sorts of practices help us to remember that we are God's child, and he gives rest to the weary.

You also mentioned Paul and how he was in prison for so much time, and that was productive time for him. Talk a little bit about how you might accept some of the limits that God imposes on your life. What is your thought process like when you're trying to sort through that? You know, I think a lot of time, especially maybe a decade or two ago, I have really thought against the limits of my life.

I have a PhD, I kind of thought I would live all over in these global cities. And if we had kids, they just kind of like come along for the ride and life would basically be unchanged. And yet, we found ourselves like everybody in real seasons of pain and loss of realizing, you know, your life doesn't maybe look like what you had planned. And I think, you know, one of the things that I've found is that, you know, one of the things that I've found is that we live the given life, not the plans. And I think I wish someone, and especially in my early years of motherhood, had told me that our limits aren't something to fight against, that they're actually something to press them towards. And so I think that the fact of being able to lean into my limits to Jesus, and to ask that he would do something with them, because I think now a decade later, some of those earlier limits of young motherhood, I've really reached the benefits of to see that God is more concerned about our character than he is about what we accomplish.

And our limits are the exact things that as we ask God to sit with us in them, as we express our anger and our lament to him, that they actually shape us into the person that God wants us to be. You know, I feel like this book is so timely because of the season that we're in with COVID. And I know people that are listening will find that there are a lot of disappointments, they may have thought, oh, the last couple years, we were going to travel or, you know, I was starting a business. And then there's been a lot of illness. And of course, we've had to change our plans quite a bit because of that.

But you wrote a book. So there is that sense, isn't there, that we've got to trust God with this time, especially as a world and a nation that we're in the middle of? Mm hmm. I think that's so true. I think we've always been limited, but the last year and a half has really shown us in stark relief what our limits are. You know, I think when the pandemic started, everyone's like, I'm going to learn a new language and make sourdough bread, you know, all of these sorts of things.

And we realized we were just so emotionally exhausted from the whole world feeling like it had been turned upside down. And so I think so many people have said as they have read a spacious life that it felt like a breath of fresh air. And so I think that's just so encouraging to me as an author. But for future readers, I think I realized there's so many things written out there about you need to hustle, right?

You need to show that you're worthy. And even in Christian spaces, that our work is what defines us. And this idea of freedom as something that we achieve and that we're only free unless we can always make any sort of choice at any point. And to realize that makes us really thinly connected in our communities. And it also is a thin connection to Jesus. And so I think I just want to encourage folks that we don't need, probably at this point in our lives, more arguments right now.

They're everywhere. But we actually need invitations and the spacious life really is an invitation into contentment and wrestling through those hard limits that we all have to. You mentioned the arguments and there's so much contention and we look around and there just seems to be so many areas that are calling to us to get in and fight. So how do we justify resting at a time where there just seems to be so many disturbing things happening around us in our country and our world?

One thing I keep coming back to is there's a little bit from, I think he's a sociologist and Friedman talks about being a non-anxious presence, whether that's in parenting or on the internet or in your work. And I think that's such a beautiful way of thinking about this sort of spaciousness that grows when we are hidden in Christ, when we have our primary identity as his beloved child, as we've wrestled through our limits with God, as we have kind of got our hard edges lost off that we will be in the places that God has called us to be non-anxious presences. And so there is a sense in which rest helps restore us so that we can then participate in the work that God's already doing. I think so much of the anger and the vitriol that we see across political spectrums all across the board is because ultimately we think that our idea, whatever idea it might be, is the thing that's really going to be the linchpin in our lives to give it meaning. And yet I think we can still fight for justice and for healing and for wholeness, but when that is not our thing that justifies us, when it becomes, hey, I believe God cares for this group of people and therefore I want to be participating in that.

That will make our tone much less anxious, much less vitriolic, and rest is a thing as we learn to hide ourselves in Christ that then enables us to do good work well. Great. Thank you so much.

So besides your book, which of course this is a new book, you have others, but this new book is A Spacious Life, Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limitations. Besides that, you also have a podcast. So tell us where we can find that so we can continue to learn from you. Thank you. So I host the Finding Holy podcast, and you can find that wherever you listen to your podcast. You can also get that link at my website and listen directly on my website at aahales.com slash podcast. And yeah, I'd love to continue the conversation. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Dr. Ashley Hales. Thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to the show online and to learn more about NC Families work to inform, encourage and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family.