The Gift of Forgiveness

I grew up in a religious household. I was always performing and trying to do the right thing from childhood through my teenage years. I was famously known for being a goody two shoes. 

The funny thing about performance is the harder I tried, the more invisible I felt. 

By my college years, my home life had unraveled. I finally reached the point where I thought, If following all these rules to earn love feels like this, then I'm done. I walked away from a conditional god of striving.

After many poor decisions between the ages of 18 to 22, choices that still grieve me at times. I met Jesus at rock bottom, not through religion but through relationship.

For the first time in my life, I experienced true grace and mercy...things "good girls" never really experience in their aim of perfection. 

I still struggle with forgiving myself. Some times I look back and wonder, Who was that Ashley? But I also know I could never have experienced the freedom only Christ offers without first experiencing his grace. He undeservingly restored me back to my rightful place because of His love.

Today, I'm living a life more beautiful than I ever imagined, and it all flows from that place of grace and mercy.

As my relationship with the Lord grew, I began to see His commands differently.

They were no longer a checklist for becoming a "good girl." Instead, I realized His laws, boundaries, and commandments are expressions of a loving Father's heart. They're given for our protection and our flourishing, much like a parent creates boundaries to keep their children safe.

I stopped reading Scripture through the lens of earning God's love and began reading it through the lens of a Father who already loved me. His call to "be holy, because I am holy" wasn't an impossible standard to gain His approval. It was an invitation to become more like Him because I already belonged to Him.

Here I am now at 41, still learning the depths of God's love through forgiveness. 

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:14–15 that if we forgive others, our Heavenly Father will forgive us.

For years, that passage felt like an ultimatum. If I don't forgive, then I can't be forgiven. If I can't be forgiven, then I won't go to heaven.

But I've come to believe it's so much more beautiful than that.

Jesus is giving us a gift, one that is double fold, 

                                                                 a gift of freedom.

Forgiveness isn't primarily for the person who hurt me. It's for me! It's choosing to no longer stay emotionally tied to the person or the pain that wounded me.

One of my biggest hurdles through trauma therapy has been forgiveness. I hold onto things tightly, almost believing that if I keep those grievances close, they'll somehow protect me from being hurt again.

But it's truly the opposite. 

Unforgiveness doesn't protect me.

It imprisons me.

Lack of forgiveness holds me back to living fully.

For a long time, I thought Christianity taught that forgiving someone meant turning the other cheek in the sense of becoming a doormat. That forgiveness meant allowing people to continue hurting me.

It's so far from truth.

I've been reading Forgive for Good by Dr. Fred Luskin, and he writes that forgiveness is "the decision to free ourselves from the personal offense and blame that keep us stuck in a cycle of suffering."

That definition changed something for me.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. In fact, we shouldn't forget what happened because wisdom learns from the past.

Forgiveness is also NOT reconciliation.

Reconciliation means rebuilding a relationship with someone who has hurt you. Forgiveness simply means making peace with the painful part of your past so it no longer controls your present. You can forgive someone completely and still decide that a relationship with them is no longer healthy.

The dictionary defines forgiveness as a conscious, voluntary choice to release resentment, bitterness, and the desire for revenge toward someone who has harmed you. It's an internal process that frees you from the grip of your past, not an excuse for someone else's behavior.

Look at what grows in the soil of unforgiveness: resentment, bitterness, malice. Those are very opposite of the fruit of the spirit. They quietly become stumbling blocks to our lives.

When forgiveness creates space in my heart, I have more capacity to love others well. I think more clearly. I feel lighter. I become more creative. I walk with greater confidence. I begin living as the woman God created me to be instead of the woman still carrying yesterday's wounds. 

Because He has forgiven us, we are able to forgive. We get to walk in His freedom.

Forgiveness isn't simply about escaping judgment someday.

It's an invitation to experience freedom today.

It allows us to become more fully who the Father already sees us to be.

This week, forgiveness has looked like setting new boundaries. Ironically, those boundaries have made forgiveness easier, not harder. Once I no longer felt responsible for protecting myself through resentment, I found I could finally let go.

The freedom that has followed has lifted so much fog from my life. I have more peace. More capacity to love. More room for community. More joy.

Maybe that's what Jesus was inviting us into all along.

Not another burden to carry or another rule to follow, but the freedom His perfect love can give.

The kind of freedom that lets us walk more fully into the people God created us to be.

10 Things I Wish I Had Learned Sooner

Recently, I stepped away from a job I loved, a role that felt like family and part of my identity.

For this season, I felt called to put my feet back in my home and lean fully into motherhood again. While I don't regret that decision, I've had to work through the loss of identity that came with it.

Some days feel like Groundhog Day all over again, dishes, laundry, chauffer Mom, dinner, repeat. Motherhood is the most meaningful work of my life, but it can also be surprisingly isolating if you don't intentionally fill it with people, purpose, and connection.

This morning, I sat down wondering if  I had anything worth sharing. Then, I was challenged to write 10 Things I wish someone would have told me sooner. 

Five Minutes later, this is what came out:

1. Boundaries are your friend. Walls are protection not connection. Boundaries teach others how to treat you and love you. The hardest part will be learning to stand firmly behind them, but peace will follow, resentments and anger learn to fall away. You will find self respect again.

2. My voice is the most powerful tool in my box. Stop letting others squelch it. Stop appeasing others at the cost of self erasure.

3. Let go & try new things. I will find I'm good at so many things, which will only lead me to growing in confidence and have more fun...live the life you were meant to have all along.

4. Everything I do now is shaping the next decade. 

My health, working out, routines, relationships, parenting, finances, every bit of it are seeds into the future. My 30s are now playing into my 40s, and what I'm doing in my 40s is planting seeds for my 50s, and so on. If I am investing in healthy eating, getting in movement and flexibility, being good stewards of our money, how we parent and love our kids, are all going to affect more than just today. Solving today is pouring over into the next decades of our lives.

5. Our children are our greatest treasure. My motherhood is creating my children's childhood. The ordinary moments that feel small today are becoming the memories they'll carry tomorrow. Watching them grow has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I get the privilege of loving them in ways I didn't always experience myself, and there is something beautiful about watching those seeds take root and bloom.

6. Learning to love yourself matters. The way I talk to myself becomes the way my children learn to talk to themselves. Learning to love myself has never come naturally, but learning to love myself isn't selfish; It's one of the greatest gifts I can give my children.

Reminder to self: your children are half you and your children are so easy to love, so what does that make you? 

7. Daily walks with my husband is the newest best thing that entered our marriage outside of prayer. It's uninterrupted time from kids, phones, distractions where we can share about our day, our struggles, what God is speaking us through our daily Bible reading. It's been the best way to connect.

Also adding our schedule, budget, and life chats every Saturday morning at the kitchen table has been a staple in our marriage since the kids were little. It keeps us on the same page, most of the time. We pull out our budget, calendars, and lists for important discussion after Breakfast on Saturday mornings. The kids hear us talk together, get on the same page, and sometimes work through different ideas. It's healthy for them to see communicate with each other when it's easy and difficult.

8. Healing myself is healing my kids, hopefully extending down to grandkids. Our children are our greatest legacy.

9. Community is the biggest missing piece of your life, if you don't have it. Iron sharpens iron. Community changed the trajectory of our lives. God uses His Word, but He also uses His people. Friends, mentors, and small groups have helped us see blind spots, challenged us to grow, and pointed us back to Jesus when we needed it most. 

10. Intentional parenting is your biggest tool. Your job isn't to control your children. Your job is to aim them. One day your children will make their own choices. They won't follow every path you imagined, and they won't always hit the exact target you envisioned. But intentional parenting helps point the arrow. 

The goal isn't perfect parenting. The goal is connection. It's being present, engaged, and intentional while they're under your roof. Then, little by little, you loosen your grip and trust God with the rest. 

Parenting is a long process of guiding, releasing, and praying. 

Pumpkin Cheesecake & Perspective

One of the most memorable moments of our wedding weekend happened the night before the wedding.

My husband stood up at our rehearsal dinner and gave the most eloquent toast. In front of our family and friends, he spoke about me, about us, in a way that left the whole room quiet. I remember sitting there in awe of the man I was about to marry, listening to him say things so thoughtful and sincere about his soon-to-be bride. I think most of us were speechless by the time he finished. Tissues were being passed around the room.

I was the proudest Bride.

It was one of those cherished moments that put everything in perspective for me. The next day would be our wedding day, one of the biggest days of our lives. As a bride, all the things you wish it to be are held close to your heart, details many women dream about from the time they are little girls. But in that moment, none of those things mattered. It didn't matter where, or what, or even how. Nothing else mattered, the whys, the what-ifs. Our wedding day was meant to mark the rest of our lives together, and this, this man, was the most right thing I had ever felt in my whole life.

This past January, my husband wanted to go all out for our 15-year anniversary- take a trip, do something big. But honestly, I've been in a season of burnout, feeling like I was never quite living up to enough in all the areas of life: home, work, kids, marriage. So instead, I asked if we could just go to our favorite date night place, the one where we always seem to reconnect. 

We follow a simple rule for great connecting conversations on Date Night: no talking about work or the kids.

Those are beautiful parts of our life, but they also make up so much of our daily identity. When our conversations reach outside those lines, we rediscover the other parts of each other: the dreams, ideas, opinions, and curiosities that made us interesting to each other in the first place. Date night becomes our chance to remember who we were before we became teammates running a household. Two people who still enjoy learning about one another. We always leave feeling deeply connected, having had the best time remembering who we are together.

So we went to our favorite place for our anniversary, thinking it would be like any other date night until my husband pulled out a letter.

Now, my husband, being a true romancer at heart, has notoriously written me letters over the years. I can always count on a beautiful one on our anniversary. Usually he hands it to me to read later, but this time he wanted to read it to me over dessert.

My heart stopped. 

He started reading, looking me in the eyes, sharing things I had never heard him express out loud or in any other letter. Beautiful words my soul hardly knew how to hold.

And for those of you who were at our wedding and know the inside story, my “double smile” meeting Kyle trying to hold it together; it was that all over again.

I was that bride-to-be sitting down at our rehearsal dinner all over again.

Fifteen years in, in that moment, everything came into perspective. Nothing else mattered but us and the life we are building together. So much clarity came into full view in those quiet moments over pumpkin cheesecake and drinks.

As I sat there listening to him read those words, something inside me softened. The pressure I’d been carrying for months—the feeling that I was falling short everywhere—suddenly felt quieter.

Not gone. But quieter.

Because in that moment, the perspective was clear again. The life we are building together was never meant to be measured by perfection or performance.

It was always meant to be built right here- in conversations, laughter, letters, and pumpkin cheesecake across a table.

And maybe that’s the season I’m stepping into now.

Learning how to see clearly all over again.