Ashley Hales | Embracing Limits, 154

Embracing Limits | Ashley Hales

Ashley Hales | Embracing Limits

Ashley Hales (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is a writer, speaker, and host of the Finding Holy podcast.

She is the author of A Spacious Life and Finding Holy in the Suburbs and her writing has been featured in Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and The Gospel Coalition.

Ashley is married to a pastor and the mother to four children.

Ashley Hales joins Amber to discuss limits, and how slowing down and embracing limits frees us to more fully enjoy our lives.

Embracing Limits Questions:

  1. (5:29) You’ve recently released A Spacious Life: Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limits. Share a little of your personal backstory with the rat race, the hustle, and the Western way.
  2. (10:28) Mantras we frequently hear are, “Be the hero of your own story,” “Follow Your Dreams,” “You Got This Girl.” What are some of the “mantras” Jesus spoke that promote a very different approach to life?
  3. (13:31) Why are we so resistant to the idea of limits?
  4. (15:37) How are limits actually freeing, helping us to flourish?
  5. (19:07) Have you found embracing limits is a choice you have to make time and time again?
  6. (21:33) What are pocket practices and how can they help us find a little more breathing room in life?
  7. (23:52) What are some practical ways we can cultivate a more spacious life?
  8. (29:48) How have you experienced the sufficiency of God’s grace in your life?

Quotes to Remember From Embracing Limits:

Wendell Berry says, “We live the given life, not the planned.”

“If the point of life is not self referential, but it is to find our identity in God, then our limits can actually be invitations to knowing God.”

“We used to live more of given lives and now we have more options open to us and it’s not necessarily a good thing.”

“I think the invitation really is to acknowledge our weariness, to acknowledge our exhaustion, to acknowledge our broken relationships, and to come to God, come to Jesus, to begin to learn those unforced rhythms of grace.”

“Some of the invitations I lay out in A Spacious Life are things like the invitation to put down social media…. That’s one of the things we go to that we think will satisfy us or provide community and it does for a little bit, but it begins to form us away from coming to Jesus.”

“We figure a life of hustle and hurry is how we’re going to get those things that we’ve already been given like an identity and a purpose and a name, and belonging with God.”

“The biggest hope was that as people read A Spacious Life that they would experience and know that their God given limits are good. And when their hearts pinch a little, that they would press into Jesus knowing that He was limited for the sake of love.”

Resources Mentioned:

Related Episodes:

If the point of life is not self referential, but it is to find our identity in God, then our limits can actually be invitations to knowing God.
I think the invitation is to acknowledge our weariness, to acknowledge our exhaustion, to acknowledge our broken relationships, and to come to God, come to Jesus to begin to learn those unforced rhythms of grace.
We figure a life of hustle and hurry is how we're going to get those things that we've already been given like an identity and a purpose and a name, and belonging with God.

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