Listen to the Episode here or if you like to read, read on!

Living created is a podcast here to bring girls together for one reason to discover our passions and our purposes in life. God created us individually for reasons only we can discover and live out.

Right now society is trying to tell us how to live and who to be, but we must stop listening to them and start seeking answers together. In this post, I’ll share my passion behind this project, what the three steps to living created are, and what’s to come.

I am so excited to start recording this podcast. It’s been in the back of my head for months and honestly it’s taken me this long to start it and I am so excited, so excited. My tagline for this podcast and my website is this, discovering what we are created for together.

I’ve been in a season where I’m trying to discover and just learn more about who God created me to be and what he created me to do. And I know other people are looking for the exact same thing. I have a lot of friends who asked me the same questions. We’re kind of all in the same boat trying to discover this together. And I figured why not start a podcast and have a blog where people who are in the same season can come together, ask each other questions, encourage each other, and just do this together.

Who is this Podcast for?

It’s for the girl feeling a little lost in life. The girl trying to discover why guy created her, the girl needing a next step to take life is crazy.

And I don’t care what season you’re in, whether you’re graduating high school soon or you’re trying to navigate what college is like living at your school, making friends, going to class, trying to figure out what you want to do after school. Or if you’ve already graduated and you’ve thought that when you chose a major that would be what you did for the rest of your life and it would be an easy step into a career and it turns out it wasn’t that easy of a step into a career. The job is not what you were thinking you would be and you don’t seem to have any community in this season of life and it is super hard.

That is exactly the season I am in. God has taken me on quite the journey. This is not at all where I expected to be when I was making my flat plan for graduating college. It did not include moving back to where my parents live and buying a house and just try to navigate for different jobs to pay the bills like this was not the plan, but I know and I have peace that this is where God’s called me to be right now.

Why? I do not know, but we are going to discover that together. So I just wanted to share a little bit about myself.

My name is Ashley and I became a believer when I was 16 which I’m going to share just a little bit of my testimony because it will make sense with my blogging story, which is crazy how that all comes together.

I grew up in a Christian home and I became a believer when I was 16. I went to a church camp and of course, that’s super cliche. I know, I know, but it was life changing for me. There was a bunch of us, probably a few hundred kids at the camp. They had us get on our hands and knees and just pray to God. I did and he spoke to me. He convicted me of things. He spoke over my life and it was a very, just a life changing, which I already used, but life changing moment because in that second my all the head knowledge, everything I knew about God became part knowledge and I believed at all and it kind of just set me on fire for the Lord. And ever since then I’ve been seeking him.

I’ve been loving him and just honoring him with my life as best I can. And that is kind of how I became a believer. And then in that same weekend we had different mentors and there was one in, her name was Natalie and she was 18 and I absolutely adore her to this day.

And we had to sit down and just speak with her about what was going on in our lives and just share what God was teaching us on that week, during that week and everything. And so I sat down with her and she was asking me what I felt like God was telling me to do. And at that time I told her I felt like God was telling me to use my gifts and to make a blog. So when I was 16 and I went home and I started learning a few things about what blogging looks like.

I learned a little bit about coding, I learned a little bit about writing and everything. And so I started that blogging journey when I was 16 a lot of that I wrote for myself. I wrote on random subjects like DIY projects. And how to make friends and all that stuff. And so as I grew older, as I went to college, I continued writing and continued blogging.

And it changed over the years. I developed more of a voice and I started sharing more about topics that other people would ask me about and things that other people were searching for. And so I ended up getting inspired to start writing for others more. And so when I was about to graduate college, I was what? I was 20 years old when I graduated.

I became a missionary in the country of Ukraine as soon as I graduated college. And so right before that I was starting to fundraise and I had to fundraise all the money for an entire year so that I could live abroad. And so for my fundraising process, I bought these black tee shirts and I hand stitch the word created over where like the pocket would be. I adore that word and it’s just been something that God’s kind of spoken over me, that he created me for a purpose and I was created to be creative. And so it’s kind of just my favorite word. When I was thinking about shifting my blog from Ashleyjobruce.com which was a little bit more focused on me, shifting it to other girls, I decided to go with created as my main word.

And then I decided to call it a magazine because I wanted it to have a broad number of subjects talked about and have multiple writers. So it’s not just about me. And so that’s Kinda how my shift turned from my personal blog to a blog that I shared with others and started focusing on collaborating with others and all that jazz. And so I ended up moving back from Ukraine in the end of last year. And I had been living in Georgia, in the north Georgia mountains, and lots of things have changed, but is a okay. And this is where I’m at in life.

I finally got to a point where I realized every single plan that I had made for myself was not working out. I discovered my passion for mission work through college. And I really felt like that was what God wanted me to run after, which was fulltime mission work.

And then I ended up going there and I actually got sick physically and it was just a very, very difficult seven months. But I learned a lot about who I am and who God created me to be and who he is.

But he still flipped everything about my life upside down. Literally all my plans were now wrong and nothing was working out. Now I live in a city I never wanted to live because it’s like in the middle of nowhere. And I live near my parents, which was also not in the plan, but I love them and I’m just in a season of discovery and I want to do it and experience it with others. And so here we are.

Welcome to my mess.

Okay. Now that I’ve shared a little bit about my story and who I am, I want to share a little bit more about created mag in the vision God put in my heart for this online blog in podcast.

What does it look like to live created?

I was thinking about what it looks like to live created because living created looks like fulfilling our passions and purposes set apart for us by God so that we can make a difference on earth, love others and love God and just, you know, bring him glory, which is what we’re all called to do. And so when I was thinking about that, I was trying to figure out, okay, so how do we go from point a not knowing what our purpose is, not knowing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives to point B fulfilling and living our lives as God created us to live. So I started brainstorming about what I learned and there are three steps that came about out of my asking questions and seeking answers.

Step 1: Passionately Pursue God

So number one, passionately pursue God because when we discover what our purpose is, we also discover what our passions are.

It all is rooted in our relationship with God because he will reveal those to us. He will develop us into the person he needs us to be, and he will speak truth over us and guide us in the entire process.

If we don’t have that relationship with God, if we don’t pursue him daily, then we’re gonna miss out on finding our purpose because we’re only going to get a fraction of what he created us for because we’re missing out on him who is ultimately the point of life to follow him. He’s it.

Step 2: Be Faithful Daily

Now, step two looks a little bit more applicable, a little bit more of like a daily action. I believe step two in finding our purpose in living out our creative life is to be faithful daily.

I think that we need to be faithful in a lot of different areas of our lives, not just the one areas that we really struggle with, but also all of our relationships and the way that we manage our money and spend our money the way that we love others.

The way that we serve in the church, the way that we just live our daily lives, the way we work are all opportunities to serve Him well.

Each of us step into different places in the world every day. So some of you might step into a classroom and are there for multiple hours or maybe you’re in college and you go to one class and then you go to lunch with friends and then you have to work in the afternoons. We all end up in different places, but we’re all called to be faithful to the Lord and to be faithful to what he’s called us to do in those places.

The thing with being faithful daily is it builds on itself. The more we show God that we’re pursuing him today and we’re trying to honor him with our actions, our words and the way that we love others, it will build on itself.

He’ll see that and he’ll give us more responsibility and he’ll just reveal more to us because he is seeing that we are choosing him and so being faithful is just a single step that may look simple today. It could be praying with a friend, it could be choosing to serve someone, it could be slowing down and taking a few minutes to sit with someone who is grieving.

There are so many different ways that we can be faithful today, but it all builds on itself.

Step 3: Impact the World

And my third step to live in created is my personal favorite one, which is to impact the world. When we are passionately pursuing God and when we are being faithful to him daily, then we will naturally be impacting the world. Impacting the world will look differently for each of us and in the seasons that we’re in. And it might not seem so grand, it could be very simple and you could be really faithful and loving that one that’s hard to love and you could end up impacting their lives even if you can never see it.

And down the road they ended up bringing all these people to Christ because you love them very, very well. So impacting the world is kind of a result of our actions and it’s not something that we need to be striving for. It will just kind of happen. And I think that’s so cool because God can see all that and the results of all the hard work that we put into the different areas of our lives.

One day I’m hoping in heaven we all sit with God and he’ll show me the results of small faithful actions I took and he’ll show me all the lives that were impacted by me being faithful to him and loving him. I think that is so cool. I really believe that impacting the world is the third step to living created and all three of them kind of work together to reveal to us and to reveal to the world why we were created.

What to expect

So back to what this podcast and blog will look like. We will explore these topics in very applicable ways. I hate listening to podcasts that are just clearly lacking a way to apply them because I could hear all the stories and all the great information and then walk away being inspired but not sure how to take the next step and live those things out.

So what to expect. There will be episodes/blog posts every Monday released and they will be on different topics that we will explore including how to grow with God, how to be faithful with your money, how to be faithful in your relationships, how to be faithful at work and in serving and in all the ways of life. We will also be sharing stories in answering questions.

Have a question you want answered in a blog post or podcast episode? Ask here!

Subscribe to the podcast and share this with one friend so we can get the word out!