Lessons re-learned.

"New year, New me!"- Me

"As your friend in advertising, never say that about yourself again."-Kathryn Van Buskirk

2009 was anything but easy. I learned an entire new set of emotions that I had no idea existed deep within me. And with those came happiness, pain, joy, sorrow and the darkest days I'd known. I soared high and crashed even harder. I laughed deeply and cried tears of exhausting pain. I loved gently and was heart broken forcefully. I gave 100% of myself and 100% of myself I selfishly kept. I felt success and I felt failure, compliments and insults. I fell back in love with the tender grace of God only to ignore it the minute something better came along. I learned something new about myself almost daily, more often than not it wasn't something positive. Simply put: I felt it all.

I didn't understand why this was so hard, why nothing was working out. Why all of my life felt like one big missed connection between who I thought I was and who I was in actuality. More than once, as I cried to my mom, she would look at me and say,

"Libby, God takes you through something again because you didn't learn it right the first time."

Theme of 2009: re-living my past mistakes. Over, and over, and over and OVER. (Clearly I'm a stubborn learner.)

If I could put a title on the past year of my life, I'd call it "Life in the Refiner's fire." I didn't realize until last week that that's what was happening. That this pain wasn't all for naught, that this pain was growing up. This pain was how my precious Savior was teaching me how to be more like Him, how to love like Him, how to treat others with grace like Him. This fire is how he drew me back to His heart and how he taught me (again) that His love is sufficient.

My prayer/resolution for 2010 is simple:

I prayerfully resolve to allow the grace of God to refine me daily. To throw me into the fire where he can strip away the person that I think I am, so he can make me the person that He knows I can be.

Here's to 2010: To more laughter, more joy, more trials and more success than any of us could imagine possible.

love,

Elizabeth Ashley

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”

Anne Lamott