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Serita Jakes says when you've lost enough, you quietly start answering to a new name, and you don't even notice you're doing it. She says God already named you something else, and almost no one shows you where to find it. Serita Jakes is the First Lady of one of the largest churches in America, married to Bishop T.D. Jakes for over forty years. But she will stand up and tell you what those years actually cost her. In the first few years of her marriage, she crawled to her own front door on her hands and knees in excruciating pain. Emergency surgery. Then another. Months walking around with a catheter, embarrassed, hiding it. Then she looked up, and within one week, her mother was gone. She stood there in the wreckage of it and asked the question. "What happened to all that winning? What happened to all that joy? What happened to me?" And then she preached on a woman in the Bible named Naomi, who asked the very same thing. Naomi lost her husband. Then both her sons. She went out of her hometown full, and came back with nothing. And when the women of her town ran out to greet her by name, Naomi stopped them. "Do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me." Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter. She had lost so much that she renamed herself after it. And Serita looked out at the room and asked the question that went straight through me. "Why would you change your name when God has already told you who you are?" Because I was that woman. I want to tell you about a specific morning. I was standing at my kitchen sink, and a neighbor I barely knew said, "How are you?" the way people do, not really asking. And I heard myself say, "Oh, I'm just tired. I'm just getting through." But what I meant was bigger than that. Somewhere in the last few years, between the loss and the diagnosis and the thing that fell apart that I don't talk about, I had quietly started believing that this was just who I was now. Tired. Bitter. Done. The woman things happen to. I had renamed myself. And I didn't even notice the day I started answering to it. And here's the part underneath it. I'd been a Christian the whole time. I went to church. I knew my verses. I was the one other people called the strong one. But Serita said the thing about Naomi that exposed me. She said Naomi was stuck in a foreign country surrounded by people who didn't know her God, and she finally realized, "in order for me to get through this, I'm going to have to rekindle my relationship with God. And I can't do it here." That was me. I was surrounded by everything except an actual relationship with him. I had church. I had verses on the wall. I had the songs memorized. But I had never once sat down and actually come to know the God those verses were about. So when the losses came and started renaming me, I had nothing underneath to argue back with. I couldn't tell you who God said I was, because I'd never really read it. I only knew the name my circumstances had given me. That's the one thing Serita can't hand you from a stage. She can preach your real name over you for an hour. She can't go home and rebuild your relationship with God for you. Only actually coming to know him, the whole of him, can do that. That's what changed everything for me. A 52-week guided study that walks you through the entire Bible, one week at a time, from Genesis to Revelation. Where you finally go back, like Naomi did, to the only place the bitterness lifts. Knowing God for yourself. Before each week, it tells you exactly what you're walking into. Who wrote it. When. Why. What was happening at the time. And underneath all of it, one steady answer to the question I'd stopped even asking. Who does God say I am. Ruth: where Naomi, the woman who renamed herself Bitter, ends up holding a baby on her chest that restores her joy, and becomes part of the family line of a king. The empty woman, written back into the story. The Psalms: a God who says he knit you together himself and calls you the apple of his eye. The name you were looking for, finally on the page. Isaiah: a God who looks at a woman the world has counted out and says he's given her a new name, that he will not call her Forsaken, but his own. For the first time in my life, I wasn't reading verses I couldn't feel. I was finally hearing what God actually called me, loud enough to drown out what the losses had been calling me for years. Verses I'd read a hundred times suddenly meant something, because I finally understood what they were saying. I'd open it in the morning and not want to close it. And slowly, I stopped answering to Mara. I stopped introducing myself as tired, as done, as the woman things happen to. Serita said her losses weren't the end of her story. She told us her wins. At sixty she started her business. At sixty-five she finished her degrees. At seventy her daughters got her up there preaching. And she said the line I'll never forget. "Even when I lose, I win again." And to the woman who's quietly started believing her loss is her name now, hear this. That is not who you are. God already named you, before any of it, and the name still stands. But you'll never believe it secondhand. You have to go back and finally know the God who gave it to you. Right now it's up to 62% off, and every order comes with a free pen pack. Don't spend another year answering to a name your loss gave you. Don't spend another year knowing about God instead of knowing him. Even when you lose, you win again. Tap below and grab yours before they sell out.