How long was it after we got married that you realized I'm not the amazing guy you thought I was?
Please don't say, like, an hour. Actually, do you want to know, like, are you really asking me this? Yeah, I'm asking you this. I mean, I know it. And our listeners know at the six-month mark, you said marrying you is the biggest mistake of my life. So, they know it happened at month six, but did it happen before then?
I'm sensing that it did. Like, honeymoon? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.
And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. Probably a month in, we are driving to staff training for crew. So, we're driving cross-country in our car. It's this old Saab had broken down three times. We call it the Saab story. And the first two times, we're like, oh, Jesus, you'll take care of us.
We trust you. And then we had spent the night somewhere in nowhere, Nebraska. And they supposedly fixed our car.
And the next day, it breaks down again. And I turned to Dave. We'd just been married maybe three weeks. I'm like, hey. I did not think you're going to tell this story.
Yes. Should we pray about it? He goes, pray?
You think there's a God that hears us? He doesn't hear us. He doesn't know what's going on. And he gets out of the car. He takes his pants off on the highway because we took a shortcut.
We're in nowhere anywhere. We're in a desert. And he takes his shorts off. He's in his underwear, walking down.
No, no, no, no. I put on shorts. I took off my jeans and put on shorts. You're acting like I'm walking down the...
He's walking down the highway, yelling, yelling at God. So, that was the moment. And I'm sitting in the car.
I'm 19 years old. And I'm thinking, is this really the man I married? Well, the reason I bring it up... Did you think I was going to go there?
No. Obviously, I did not think you're going to go there. Every married couple has a story about that. And you know what? Someday we're going to tell the end of that story because it ends pretty good. But yeah, I was thinking every, not just married couple, every person, I think, in life has an expectation about what life will be, what their marriage will be, their job.
You can put anything you want in that blank. And usually, if not always, it doesn't match up to the expectation. And then you're like, what do I do now? That's universal. And so, we've got the woman in the studio today to help us with this universal problem. She's written a book.
In fact, who cares about the book? You've lived this out in your life. So, I would just say welcome to Family Life Today, Ashley Hales. Thank you for being here. Thank you. It's such a pleasure. And I do want to hear the end of that story.
It sounds amazing. Well, you're over there laughing at the whole thing. I mean, is that similar to a story or two in your life? Well, we had a story. My husband and I went to Aruba for our honeymoon. We had gotten miles from one side of the family and the other side of the family gave us a place to stay so we could make a honeymoon work at 22.
And we had this cool jeep and then the seatbelt didn't work appropriately. And so, the next day, day two of our honeymoon, we get there. And he's like, I'm a husband. I'm going to take care of this.
Like, go do business, you know, in there and try to get an upgrade. And then he came back and he was feeling really proud of himself and was like, why do you have to be such a jerk? And so, that started on our honeymoon. So, there you are. Oh, he went in like the tough guy. I'm going to get this to happen.
Well, here's the thing that a lot of people don't know about you. How long ago was that? How long have you been married? We have almost been married 20 years. 20 years, four kids later. Yes, and here we are.
You've got one of your oldest Ezra's on this trip with you to Orlando. Yes, you have your doctorate. I do. Maybe we should call you Dr. Ashley. What's your doctorate name? In what? PhD?
In English literature. Wow. Yeah. I thought I was going to be a professor and do that whole thing and then had lots of babies and lots of moves with my husband's ministry position. And he's a pastor. Yes, he's a pastor in Colorado and God tends to give us different things than we planned. Wendell Berry says we live the given life and not the planned life. And I've held onto that because it gives me some hope in the midst of when we have all these expectations and they are dashed often.
Yeah, let's talk about that. You've written a book called The Spacious Life, trading hustle and hurry for the goodness of limits. And you start the book with sort of your story of what you hoped and expected and what you got and how you deal with that. So tell us that story because it has something to do with limits. And as I read it, I thought we've all experienced this in a different way.
It's hard. I totally related to it. I'm starting the book like, yes, yes, and yes. So share. Take us back to Scotland.
Yes. So a year after my husband and I were married, after we'd gotten through the seatbelt incident. Well, we went off to grad school to Edinburgh, Scotland.
He did seminary there and I started a Ph.D. program in English literature. And we kind of felt like we are amazing Americans. We're like cool enough to live outside of America. And we're obviously smart enough to get into these programs and we can travel around very cheaply. And we have friends from all over the world. And so even though we were eating like ramen, we just, you know, we kind of felt like, OK, life is about to start.
It's just going to go up and to the right. And you're living a dream. Right. Like, you know, there's an ancient castle, like on a volcanic crag, like on your walk to school. And you're eating with friends at dinner every night.
Exactly. We're having we had like twenty five folks over that we hosted for an American Thanksgiving. It felt like the good life was going to start. And then we moved back home and we found ourselves pregnant with Ezra and which was a delight, but also not exactly my plan.
And so we tried to figure out, OK, how are we going to live this kind of adventuresome gospel oriented life with we ended up having four children in pretty quick succession. And I just was hit again and again with my limits. The limits of my body, my pregnant children to nurse the limits of my time. And, you know, I had always succeeded intellectually. And here I am, like not able to string words together as a new mom. And I know so many different things God uses, not necessarily parenting, but it could be marriage.
It could be a place you live or career. So many things bring us to the end of ourselves. And the question is, what are we going to do with that? Is that a doorway into a more spacious life or are we going to blame God?
I was right there with you. Dave and I were married six years before we had kids. We are doing ministry together. We're thinking we are going to change the world together. We're going to impact this world for Jesus. And we're like and having babies, we'll just do it with our babies.
Right. They'll just like come along. Dave kept doing it and I was left at home and I loved that I was a mom. I felt so grateful that God had given us these kids. But I remember I started having this mantra in my head of I have no life anymore. I have no life. And I think a lot of us can get to points in our journey where we're so disappointed. I was disappointed in who I was becoming, even in my head.
Right. And the thoughts that were going on in my head, like I'm not doing anything. You know, here I am raising these kids like it's an amazing gift from God. And yet I kept looking outside thinking I wish it could have looked like I thought it was going to look. Like I didn't just become a mom really naturally. It was hard for me.
Yeah. And I think a lot of people, as you said, maybe it's their job that's not what they thought, their career path. Maybe it's friends or maybe women thought I thought I'd be married by now. And so there's so many things that are disappointing. And when you say a spacious life, what does that mean? You know, I love when the psalmist in Psalm 18 talks about, you know, he has brought me out into a spacious place.
He rescued me because he delighted in me. And I just I love that verse because really what it it it communicates that there is this sense of spaciousness that is born from God's rescue. And it's not something that we create often. You know, when we think about a spacious place or a spacious life, we can tend to think, oh, well, that'll happen if I ever get to go to Fiji, you know, stay in one of those huts above the water. That's a spacious life for, you know, when I get this promotion or when my kids leave the house or when my marriage is really thriving and flourishing. But I think what is so beautiful about the gospel is that it's actually in our limits as we press into who Jesus is and we are connected to God that we can experience that spaciousness. I love actually in the cover of my book A Spacious Life. If you look pretty closely, there's actually like an apartment building in the middle.
So it's these curtains and there's a sunrise and it, you know, but there's actually a sense that there's a city there, which is I loved that the designer did that. Because it reminds us that we can find a spacious life in real life, not just by escaping from our life. The question would be how, because when limits come in, and I don't know if this is universal or not, but I think it is. No person I know wants limits. We sort of, we rebel against them, like give me space, give me freedom to accomplish everything I think God's called me to do. And yet life limits, pain limits, we've talked about kids, you name it, which are a gift from God, but you feel like I'm sort of pressed in.
It isn't spacious. So how do you find a spacious life in the middle of a limiting life? Yeah, I think there's lots of different ways that we tend to deal with our limits. We can kind of try to control them or we can ignore them and escape from them.
We can try to hustle past them. We can fall into shame often if we hit a limit, like something's deeply wrong with us. We blame other people in our circumstances. And those are all really like unhealthy ways of dealing with our limits that really started in the garden, right? Garden of Eden. But what is so beautiful is that our limits are actually built into creation. So before sin entered the world, there were limits, right?
Like that planets have orbits. They couldn't just like go wherever they wanted and that the ground had cycles of fallow and flourishing. Like these were natural, good, God-given limits for creation and that they were to tend to a particular spot of land. And so I think part of how we learn to actually live with our limits well is firstly to realize they're good, that they're part of God's good creation.
He said it was good. Which is a great point because a lot of people would say God's limitations are because he's not a good God. Like what kind of God would give us limits, right?
Yeah, but really it's so fascinating. Like the word transgression that sometimes we use for sin actually means to go beyond, to move past something, to bypass limits. And so one of the first sins really, Adam and Eve, they're bypassing, they're transgressing their limits because instead of choosing to submit to God's authority, they're taking it into their own hands.
And we do that all the time, every day. And so I think we first have to realize that our God-given limits are good. They're intended for us to flourish.
And they're out of his love to give us good. So I think we have to remember that limits are good. And then also Jesus, being both God and man, dealt with limits. And so as we look at the life of Christ, we can look at the way that he embraced his limits as a pattern for our own lives too.
What do you mean by that? What kind of limits did Jesus have? Well, he was human. So he's leaving heavenly glory and he's born into flesh. And so he is a man with a body and living in a place and among particular people in a particular historical moment of time. So he shows us how to do that.
And he obeyed God's commandments. Right, exactly. Perfectly.
Exactly. So like when he's tempted by Satan, goes into the wilderness, Satan's like, feed yourself, turn these stones into bread. And he's like, no, I'm actually going to choose to wait on God.
That because that is who I trust, not myself, like hurry and hustle past. And I think there's just so many lessons in the life of Christ that just remind us that if we actually live God's way, we will live much more free, much more joyful, and having so much more purpose. Even when those limits pinch a little too. Why is it that we, and maybe I'm just talking for me, but I think I'm talking for most of us. We resist limits.
We, in fact, one of my struggles with giving my life to Christ, I didn't do it till I was a junior in college, so I was almost 20 years old, was all I ever heard about the Christian life was what it was going to limit me. Right. I only heard what you got to stop doing and give up.
I don't think I really understood and really never heard, oh, but what you get is unbelievable. I just was like, oh man, I can't do this anymore. I can't do that.
Who wouldn't want that life? Right. That looks really limiting. Yeah. So what is it in our DNA or our soul that says, no, limits are not good?
Yeah. No, I think since Adam and Eve, we have been rebelling against God's good limits. We want the power and control, right? We want to orchestrate our own lives. We want to be the sovereign masters and monarchs of our own lives, but we know that that always leads to exhaustion. It leads to destruction, you know. Addiction? Addiction.
I mean, a million different things. Even if we have a quote unquote good life where we're, you know, happily married and things seem to be successful, it's like we're on this moving walkway at the airport that just keeps going, right? You can never get to the thing that you think will satisfy you.
You know, the goalposts always continually move back. Until we really find ourselves in God's story with God's good guardrails kind of hemming us in, we won't begin to really experience that kind of joy and peace. I thought it was interesting that you say, I wish someone had told me to begin to pay careful attention to my limits, that there was a spacious life in there too. And so take us back to, you're a mom, you have four kids, you have your doctorate, but you were feeling so limited. What happened to make you realize, oh, wait, maybe this isn't a limited life? You know, I think like you were saying earlier, I had so much attachment to what kind of our 21st century American life says is a good life.
Right. Like that you're productive, that you're contributing to society by, you know, in in really visible and measurable ways. You know, like you're earning money.
And here I was not earning money. I was staying home with our poor kiddos, not doing the things that I thought I was supposed to be doing. But in those years, particularly, God was inviting me into communion with himself. And so all of those times where I would be praying with a girlfriend, tearful prayers about what are we doing or we messed up on parenting or we can't seem to get our house clean. You know, like those were formative years to remind me that Jesus is enough and his church is enough. And I will never really solve my identity problems by like being productive or more efficient or, you know, having certain letters after my name. That really all of our limits are an invitation to know God and to make him known.
And that's the point. One point earlier in your book, I was reading this paragraph and I thought so many people relate to this feeling. You said the questions you're asking, where had the good life gone? Where had I gone?
Yeah. Sometimes I railed at God about why the the options had dried up, but more often I just ignored him. I'd go to church, but not read my Bible. My perfunctory prayers were more out of duty than interest in God's response. I felt constrained, boxed into a new role.
Man, I'm reading that. I'm like, that sounds like a majority of us or a majority of people in the church. It just feels like I'm either mad at God or maybe I've even gotten beyond it. I'm just I'm just I'm numb. I mean, I'm ignoring him because I feel like this is all his fault.
Yeah. Talk about that. I think, you know, particularly being that we don't tend to value things like caregiving, whether it's from young moms or for, you know, caring for elderly parents or even like teaching or other professions where people are offering care to the same extent as, you know, maybe the executive in the corner office who's jet-setting around the world, to the extent that we're not actually valuing those sorts, that type of work. Those people especially can feel invisible in society. And we don't have. You know, unfortunately, I don't think that maybe it's just our busy lifestyles, but the church has not provided. We haven't done a great job as the church to provide that sort of safety net and kind of thick community that would allow people to feel seen. So I think maybe that's, you know, the call of the church is to be that thicker, tighter woven net to begin to value those things that our culture might not value so that we can at least begin to see one another. So then we don't feel unseen by God.
I think that would be a beautiful movement forward. And I would add that I think when we're where you were, and I'm not saying we won't be there in the future because there are days and there could be months or seasons in our life where it just feels like we're being limited again or we're in a valley and he's not there. And yet I think even in your experience, I know in our experience, he often shows up in people, in a person to remind us, so I'm here. And yeah, these limits, I actually know all about them. And there's a spacious life actually in them. It may not turn out the way you think, but I'm here.
You know, it's really interesting. If you go back to a highway in Colorado, when I'm ripping off my shorts and screaming at God and literally I start walking down this desert road. There's nobody coming because we actually thought the car's fixed, so we'll just take a shortcut. So we get off the main drag, which was the worst decision in the world.
And it breaks down again. And I look back and Ann's literally sitting in the car looking at her newlywed husband who's screaming at God as I walk away. Nobody's going to hear me anyway. And long story short, and it's a long story, is I start to calm down again. I'm out there by myself and then I pray. I'm like, OK, God, I know you're here. I don't know what's going on. We're supposed to be here at a certain time where we have to pay a late fee. And I'm Mr. Tightwad.
So I'm like, OK, I'm going to trust you. Somehow you're going to show up and Ann gets out of the car. It looked like we were very limited.
That's what it looked like. There were no hopes of, you know, and there's nobody driving down this road. So it's like, OK, so we have to just start walking and a car comes by. We're hitchhiking on the highway.
Put your thumb out. Thirty minutes between every car. And all of a sudden this one car comes by. And we prayed. Yeah, we probably walked several miles.
It's 100 degrees. This guy pulls over and gets out and goes, hey, is that your sob back there? You know, like he passed it. Like, yeah. He goes, what's up? We go, we don't know. The car is broken. We can't.
It won't start. Where are you going? We're like, we're going to Fort Collins, Colorado.
It's two, three hours away. He goes, huh? That's where I'm going.
Really? He goes, where are you going to Fort Collins? We go, we have to go to the student union at Colorado State University.
Huh? That's where I'm going. I'm like, you're on staff with crew because that's where staff training is going to be. He goes, no, I'm a professor at Colorado State University. I need to stop there to get another car. He goes, hey, I got a tow rope.
How about I just tow you to the student union at Colorado State University? We're like, are you serious? Long story short, he towed us there. The best thing about it is no gas money.
It was free. He tows us into this parking spot and we show up five minutes before the deadline. You know, you look back in that moment. And again, I'm not saying every sob story in your life, every limit, every valley you're in, God does it like this.
But I would say Dave too. But he did that day and it was just a reminder. God was there.
He's got us. It was a great reminder to me because I was looking at my husband thinking, is this who I married? And yet that's where we go a lot of times when we feel like we're limited.
Yeah. I'm limited by this spouse that I married or this job that I have. But when you change your gaze, go vertical and you look to God, you go vertical, all of a sudden you see everything in a different light. It's the spacious life where God is saying, I am your provider. I am your redeemer. I am your comforter. I am the one who offers grace. I'm going to show you who I am. Yeah.
Right here. And when I see God that way, then I look at Dave in a different way and I look at my circumstances in a different way. Because he is a God who redeems us if we will only look to him for that spacious life. It is so important for us to look at the events of our life from God's perspective rather than from our perspective.
As much as we're able, see God's hand in what it is we're going through. One of the things we talk about regularly at the Family Life Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaway is that our spouse is God's perfect gift to us. We don't always see it that way in marriage. We can think that our spouse is our enemy. But in fact, God has given us a gift in our husband or our wife, and we need to embrace that gift and see God's goodness in that gift. This is a subject that Ashley Hales has dived into in her book A Spacious Life.
The subtitle is Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limits. It's a book that we've got in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to request a copy, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the title of the book is A Spacious Life by Ashley Hales.
Order your copy from us online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. Now, I want to get you ready for a change that is coming next week. And to do that, I want to introduce a friend to you who's here with us, Shelby Abbott. Hello, Shelby. Hi, Bob.
How are you? Shelby has been a guest on Family Life Today with us in the past. He is an author, a speaker. He has been on staff with CREW, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, for how many years? Twenty-two and a half. That's a long time.
That is a long time. You are connected now with the Ministry of Family Life and are doing a podcast. What's the title of the podcast?
It's called A Real Life Loading, and it's for young people, for 18 to 28-year-olds. And that is with Family Life. And in the weeks ahead, you are going to be the one who is taking over the responsibility of wrapping up this daily program, this podcast, and talking with listeners about what we've just heard and providing whatever show notes we need to provide for the program.
That's right. You're passing the baton into my metaphorically sweaty palm, so hopefully I will not blow it. Well, I hope listeners will get a chance to get to know you. In fact, you and I took a few minutes recently and just visited and got a little bit of the background and the details, your history. So if listeners are interested in that, there's a link on our website at FamilyLifeToday.com where they can hear our conversation. And when they hear you next week and don't hear me, that's normal. That's the new normal, right?
Yep. I'm excited to be a part of what God is doing here on this program. And I'm curious, though, just for anyone who might be wondering, what will you be doing from here on out now that you're leaving Family Life Today?
I have been down at the La-Z-Boy store and have just made a purchase. Many of our listeners know that in addition to the work I've done on Family Life Today, I have been a bivocational pastor for more than a decade now. So I will be spending more time in the ministry of our local church where I am the one who does the preaching regularly, still writing, still speaking. We will see one another on the air and in other places in the years to come. I'm sure we will. But I'm happy to hand this off to you and look forward to you taking things forward. So glad to have you here. Thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate it deeply. Tomorrow, we hope you can be back with us.
Ashley Hales is going to be here again. But wait, you're going to be doing this. You want to take it from here? Yeah, I'm happy to try. Sure.
Why not? I mean, it's going to be my job. Tell everybody what's coming up tomorrow. Now, tomorrow, Ashley Hales will be with us again and talking about the expectations we have in life never really matching up with reality. How do we meet God in the mundane?
Because he is there and present just as much as in the exciting moments. On behalf of David and Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today.
Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most. How was that? What did you think? That was outstanding. I couldn't leave now.
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