5 Essentials for flourishing

AYSF Presents:

The 5 Essentials for Flourishing

Through all we offer at And Yet She Flourished (AYSF), we help you cultivate these 5 Essentials for Flourishing:

Courage, Wisdom, Healing, Resilience, & Allegiance (to God)

Courage

We are living in an unprecedented time in which anxiety is the most common concern reported by women pursuing counseling. And the mainstream rhetoric around anxiety is only making things worse. The prevailing narrative is that what is needed is for us to calm down. But the truth -as it may be gleaned from the Word of God- is that our intended response to fear (anxiety is fear) is to rise up, not to calm down! With the skillful support you receive at AYSF, you can learn to “stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13-14) no matter what challenges you face, instead of succumbing to the false narrative that you are – or will be – overwhelmed.

Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened & do not be dismayed,
for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

Joshua 1:9

At AYSF, we help women live courageously.

Wisdom

God tells us wisdom is more valuable than all the riches of this world (Proverbs 16:16; Job 28), but for how many of us is growing wise a top priority? Sure, we may pray for wisdom in certain circumstances, but if we’re honest, we wish that God would just drop the “right” answers to our dilemmas in our lap. The irony is, if you were just handed the “right” answer it wouldn’t require wisdom; you would just have knowledge. Knowledge is certainly important (we help women grow in knowledge, too), but wisdom is what’s needed when knowledge -especially about the future- is limited. Wisdom is about how you activate truth to navigate the unknown. At AYSF, we help you learn how to harness what God has revealed in his Word to effectively handle the complexities of your personal plotline.

Get wisdom… Do not forsake her… love her, and she will guard you…
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.

Proverbs 4:5-9

At AYSF, we help women grow wise.

Healing

In a world that profits from persuading us that pain management is the best we dare hope for, we have a God who is a healer (Exodus 15:26). That’s right: healing, not just “coping strategies,” is what is available to you in Christ. Women come to AYSF with emotional wounds that have remained open for years, even decades, and are amazed to experience real resolution in places they never thought possible. And healing is about more than “feeling better.” Imagine going into battle with a balm in your pocket, such that if you were wounded you could put it on and be healed? How much braver would you be? How much more valiantly would you fight? Healing from past wounds enables you to move forward in confidence that “If you hurt me, my God will heal me, so I will not shrink back…”

O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me…
You restored me to life.

Psalm 30:2-3

At AYSF, we help women heal.

Resilience

1. the ability to be happy or successful again after something difficult or bad has happened

2. the ability of a substance to return to its usual shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed*

Women come to us reeling from emotional hits they have taken. At AYSF, we link arms with you and help you heal, grow wiser, become more courageous, and deepen your allegiance to Christ. And as you do, you begin to recover faster and more authentically the next time you “take a hit.” Instead of staying stuck, shrinking back, or settling, you rise again: wiser, braver, made more like Jesus through your trials. You become resilent. When challenges come, you will be able to affirm, “I am afflicted but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Cor 4:8-9) Come learn how to embrace your identity as a warrior daughter of the King who is not overcome by evil, but overcomes evil with good. (Romans 12:21)

For the righteous falls seven times and rises again.

Proverbs 24:16

At AYSF, we help women become resilient.

Allegiance

At AYSF, we help you get free from distortions in how you view God: Father, Son, and Spirit… and how you think God views you. As you see God more clearly, his words become more precious and persuasive than all the other truth claims that are causing confusion in your life. The more confident you grow in God’s faithfulness to you, the more you will desire to be faithful to him in all you do. This faithfulness is what we mean by “allegiance to God.”

Allegiance to God involves reorienting our thoughts, decisions, and actions around what God has commended to us in his Word.

God desires your allegiance because he loves you and wants to free you from the bondage of leaning on your own understanding, constantly appeasing others in fear of their judgment, or getting caught up in “philosophies of this age” that do not line up with God’s Word and cannot lead to flourishing. (Prov 3:5-6; 1 Cor 4:3-4; Colossians 2:8)

At AYSF, we help you get into “total life alignment” with Christ such that all the clamoring opinions, expectations, or temptations that are not of him lose their power in your life. You will be able to say, in the words of Esther (4:16): “‘If I perish, I perish’… but my allegiance is to my glorious King, so I shall not be moved.”

Serve him faithfully with all your heart.
For consider what great things he has done for you.

1 Sam 12:24

At AYSF, we help women deepen their allegiance to Christ.

What about Love?

Isn’t love essential to flourishing??

Ultimately, love is everything! In fact, what Jesus referred to as The Greatest Commandment is:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all

your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Matthew 22:37-39; Luke 10:27

The thing is, loving well is really challenging! The reasons for this are many and complex. We could talk about our sinful nature or “flesh“ as the Bible puts it. We could talk about the very real Enemy who works tirelessly to provoke us to do things we know are unloving, as well as to deceive us into believing that certain choices and behaviors are loving when they are not. (We can discern they are not because of the bad “fruit” they produce and because they involve methods that don’t align with how Jesus did things, as we can observe in the Bible.)

But there is more…When we are emotionally hurt and don’t heal, that pain resurfaces over and over, often manifesting in ways we don’t recognize or understand. Without even realizing it, much of our behavior flows out of our deep, dominant desire: to not be hurt again. We become crippled by anxiety, controlled by anger, or stuck in apathy, which are the primary ways we try to protect ourselves. We engage in ongoing dynamics of avoidance, minimizing, blame-shifting, shaming ourselves and others, “people-pleasing,” overworking, and more, all in a desperate attempt to keep ourselves safe. We are in survival mode. It is hard to love well when you are preoccupied with your own survival.

So what do we do??

At AYSF, our many years of experience in walking with people through every imaginable (and unimaginable) kind of struggle has led us to discoveries that are truly changing lives…

It turns out that cultivating the virtues of courage, wisdom, and resilience are particularly crucial for our flourishing and for our ability to love well. Yet many women are not raised to be courageous, wise, and resilient (many of us had the opposite of these modeled for us!) Also, many of us have not had effective guidance and support to enable us to heal from past pain. And most of us have not been taught how to harness the power of God’s Word such that we are eager and able to forsake our toxic survival strategies and choose God’s wise and beautiful ways instead. But it is this kind of tenacious allegiance to Christ that enables us to prevail, no matter what we face.

So… at AYSF, we are committed to helping you cultivate what we refer to as the 5 Essentials for Flourishing – courage, wisdom, healing, resilience, and allegiance to Christ – so you can refuse to waste your life on pain avoidance, and learn to love God, yourself, and others…

the way Jesus loves you.

And that is the whole point.