When the Battle Isn’t Breaking You; It’s Shaping You
A Three-Part Series on Faith, Becoming & the Woman Called to Build What Comes Next
By: Ashlee Laughlin, Founder of Célébrez la Femme, Inc.
Part I: Spiritual Warfare: Get up & Walk
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.” — Isaiah 43:2
There is a version of spiritual warfare we have been taught to recognize immediately. It is loud. Dramatic. Everything starts going wrong at once, and somewhere between the second inconvenience and the third disappointment, somebody tells you, “Girl, the enemy is busy.”
Maybe.
But I have lived long enough to know that some of the most significant spiritual battles don't arrive looking like battles at all.
Sometimes they arrive as an awakening.
Something that used to sit comfortably in your spirit suddenly doesn't. A life you have become exceptionally good at managing begins to feel increasingly difficult to live. The things you once dismissed become harder to overlook. Your tolerance changes. Your appetite changes. Your conversations with God change. And perhaps most unsettling of all, the woman staring back at you begins wanting things the woman you used to be was willing to live without.
Nothing necessarily happened overnight.
You simply woke up.
There is something particularly complicated about that awakening for women who have built an identity around being strong. Strength can become both our superpower and our hiding place. We know how to keep moving while hurting, make dinner while disappointed, answer emails while overwhelmed and take care of everybody else while quietly negotiating with ourselves about how much longer we can keep doing this.
We call it resilience.
And sometimes it absolutely is.
But sometimes we become so good at surviving our circumstances that we never stop to consider whether survival was supposed to be permanent.
That is where spiritual warfare became real for me.
Not in some dramatic confrontation between darkness and light, but in the increasingly uncomfortable space between the woman I had learned to be and the woman I sensed I was becoming.
My awakening began during COVID.
I had survived COVID, and surviving something that frightened the entire world did something to me. Mortality has a way of stripping the decoration from your questions. Suddenly, I wasn't particularly interested in asking God for more things.
I wanted to know why I was still here.
I began praying about purpose.
Around that same time, I started waking in the middle of the night. Not occasionally. Consistently. Somewhere around 2:45 a.m., while the house was quiet and everybody else was asleep, my eyes would open.
There is a particular kind of truth that finds you when there is nobody awake to distract you from it.
So I prayed.
I talked to God. I listened. I wrestled. And slowly, things I had managed to make peace with during daylight hours became harder to explain away in the dark.
I didn't suddenly receive some grand revelation about my future. There was no vision of an organization with a beautiful name. No stage. No rooms filled with women. No awards, proclamations or evidence that would have made what eventually came next seem reasonable.
There was just an increasing awareness that something about my life had to move.
I understand that season differently now.
I can see elements of spiritual warfare in it, but I don't use that language casually. Faith should never require us to abandon wisdom. Every difficult relationship is not the devil. Every anxious thought is not spiritual warfare. Every sleepless night is not God trying to send us a message. There are things that require rest, therapy, medicine, boundaries, accountability, wise counsel and practical decisions.
Discernment matters.
But so does recognizing when the battle is over your willingness to become conscious.
Because once a woman truly sees something, keeping her asleep requires work.
Fear can do that work.
Familiarity can do it.
Shame can do it.
Other people's expectations can do it.
Even strength can do it.
Especially strength.
Because when you've spent years proving you can handle hard things, walking away from something difficult can feel strangely like failure. You know how to survive there. You know the rules there. You know exactly which parts of yourself to shrink, stretch, silence or strengthen to make that life work.
The unknown offers no such instructions.
So sometimes we stay in places we've outgrown simply because we've already learned how to survive them.
That is what makes awakening disruptive.
It doesn't immediately change your circumstances. It changes your relationship to them.
And once that happens, the battle becomes different.
For me, the answer eventually came down to one word.
Walk.
That was what I understood God to be telling me.
Not build…Not lead…Not start…Not here is your purpose.
Just walk.
I wish I could tell you I immediately understood exactly what that meant and responded with fearless obedience.
That would make a beautiful testimony. It just wouldn't be mine.
What followed was discernment. Trying to understand whether I had heard correctly. Trying to determine what walk meant when there were real people, responsibilities, history and consequences attached to movement.
Because instructions sound different when obeying them will cost you EVERYTHING.
We love the idea of asking God for purpose until purpose begins interfering with our plans.
We ask Him to order our steps, then become deeply attached to where our feet are already planted.
We ask for clarity without considering that clarity may illuminate something we would rather leave in the dark.
And sometimes we pray for a new life while fighting desperately to preserve every piece of the old one.
I had asked God what I was supposed to do with my life. Eventually, I had to confront the possibility that His answer wasn't going to begin by giving me something.
It might begin by asking me to move.
That changed the way I understood spiritual warfare. Maybe every battle isn't trying to break you. Some battles reveal you. They expose what fear has been protecting, where you've confused endurance with assignment, and the version of yourself you've kept alive simply because she knows how to survive.
Sometimes the battle is where you finally meet the woman who has been waiting underneath all that strength.
That doesn't make pain beautiful or suffering necessary. It simply means disruption can reveal what comfort allowed us to ignore.
Looking back, I understand why those nights mattered. I thought I was waking up at 2:45 in the morning.
In many ways, I was simply waking up.
I couldn't see what was ahead. I didn't know there would eventually be women, community, purpose or a stage worth standing on. I had no evidence of what was coming.
Only an awakening.
And one instruction:
Get up and walk.
Eventually, I did.
What I didn't know was that walking wouldn't immediately make my life make sense.
Sometimes when you finally obey the instruction to leave, it feels like everything is falling apart.
Because sometimes it actually is.
And mine did.
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