All right now, if we're honest, reading the Bible consistently can be a challenge, but it's never too late to start and we're in this together.

This is the Join the Journey podcast.

Thanks for joining.

I'm Lauren Atkinson on the Join the Journey staff team and today I am in the podcast studio with one of my good friends, Ashley Lawrence. Hey guys, I'm so glad to be back.

Ashley, it's so fun having you on and you're in the podcast studio pretty often, although not for

during the journey. Want to give a little insight into what you do at Watermark? Yes. So I, my role is more

known as like a Swiss Army knife role on

Watermark staff. But one of the fun things I get to do, one of the many tools in my tool belt,

is I get to produce the church leaders podcast. And so a subtle plug, if you know what the Watermark

Resources team is, is that we run a church leaders podcast where we talk about anything and everything that

applies to church leaders. And that comes out every other week. And it's just different topics that we

get to talk about with church leaders. That's awesome. And Ashley, you've shared your story before

on here, but I'd love to hear maybe some things God's been doing recently in your life.

Oh, that's a big one. Um, Recently this year, I've actually had a lot of

loss in my family, and so how my grandmother passed away a couple of weeks ago, had an aunt

passed away over the summer. And so just learning a lot about grief, but also holding in the other hand,

while I have grief in one hand, I have a lot of hope in the other hand because I did know the

Lord, which I'm so thankful for. And so I think just holding those two, kind of in

this weird tension of I miss them while they're not here on this earth, but I know that I'm

going to see them again one day. And so that gives me a lot of hope. That's so good. And you're someone

that I get to walk through life closely with, and I've seen you navigate that tension well of what does it look like to grieve but with hope and just have a lot of fun in life. We're heading into the holidays and I know you're not from Dallas. And so there's probably a lot of people. I'm also not from Dallas. We are two East Coast girls living in a Texas world.

Oh, it's hard.

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