Every Single Second

Parents have love-catch-phrases.  They are the things we say when we tuck our kids in at night.  You know - "I love you to the moon and back."  Or, "I love you with my whole heart."

Mine is,

"I love you every single second."

That's the one I tell them when the love is bubbling in my guts and I have to clench my teeth and my fists to keep from squeezing them too tightly, like Lennie Small.

This is what I told Henry this afternoon when he woke up all groggy and snuggly.  I smushed my face against his precious, smushy face and I whispered, "I love you every single second.  There has never been a second of your entire life that you have not been loved.  Every second that I've known about you, I've loved you."

Then I felt a kind of aching swell up inside of me.  I thought, "There are children to whom no one has ever said these things.  There are children that have been neglected, forgotten, resented, and abused."

For a moment I despaired, hard.  I wished that I had infinite time and infinite resources and that I could love all the babies.  I wished that I could hold them all, skin-to-skin, and sing to them and read to them and kiss them and fix all their hurts, physical and otherwise, and tell them that I LOVED them, and that they were important and special to me.   I thought, "There are children that have not been loved every single second."

But something in my chest caught, snagged.  I couldn't finish that thought, because I knew it wasn't true.

There has never been a child that wasn't loved every single second.

I almost didn't write this post because I was afraid that it would sound like I was glossing over the NECESSITY of earthly, human love.  I assure you I am not.   I want to love all the babies because it matters, I know this in my bones, and much of my giving is directed toward that end - children getting loved well.

But because of what I believe to be true about God, I cannot say that there has ever been a human being that God didn't love every single second.  That He didn't yearn for.  There has never been a person that was excluded when He said that He longs to be gracious to you.  There has never been a person that God did not die to save.

This shapes the way I understand the world and they way I interact with all people, but I don't want to direct this thought OUT today, I want to direct in.

You have been loved every single second.

There has never been a second in which you were not loved. There has never been a circumstance in which you were not loved. There has never been a thing you did, or a place you went, or a thing you believed that made you unloved, even for a second.

There is no season of hate or anger or disbelief that made God stop wanting you.  You cannot be mean enough to make Him give up on you.  You are not trapped; He will let you go, but He will watch you walk away with great pain, loving you every single second.

In your darkest days, in your deep, endless depression, in your worst, most offensive thoughts, you are loved.

Maybe you are an addict and you've known it for a while, and your nights keep getting darker and your mornings more uncertain.  Or maybe you are doing a thing that you swore you would NEVER DO.  Maybe you haven't changed your mind about it, you still hate it, but you're doing it anyway, which makes you hate yourself.

You are loved in the middle of that mess.   EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND.

If you are absolutely OVER IT, and life has become, as dear Anne Lamott says, "just too life-y,"  you might be unhappy, unhealthy, unhopeful, and scared to death - but you are not unloved.  You can be un-everything else, but you are not un-loved.

You have been loved every day, every hour, every minute, every second.  You have been loved every heartbeat of your entire life.

When you were abandoned here, you were not abandoned there.  I cannot unpack the problem of evil here, or even fully in my own mind, but I can tell you this:  you were not delivered from all pain, but you were loved through all of the pain.  Every ounce.  You were loved every second.

God compares his love to parent-love.  He compares his arms to the wings of a mother bird, drawing her babies in close to her bosom, warm and safe.  He says he could no sooner forget you than a mother could forget the baby at her breast.  He says "I have loved you with AN EVERLASTING LOVE."  He says that he wants to give you good things, like Dads want to give their little boys and little girls good things, only better, because God is better than human dads times a billion.

He loves us with parent-love, only purer.  More long-suffering.  This means that, unlike me, He doesn't ever want to give one of his loved ones away free to a good home when they are being really pig-headed and annoying.  He never loses it.  He never grows tired or weary.

The love that I have for my children is fierce, rabid, overwhelming, and immobilizing.  I love them in a way that doesn't even make sense.  But even that love is tempered by my own selfishness and humanity - by my need for sleep and food to be a pleasant human being.  My great big love for my kids is tempered by my impatience and my lack of empathy.

But God's parent-love is not constrained by those things.  His love is constrained by nothing.  His love is unhindered and unstoppable and unfathomable.

The great joy of my life is being this boy's safe place, the arms that comfort.  I love him, and I could never be close enough for long enough to breathe him in the way I want to.  I love him every single second.  This child of mine is loved EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND.

And so are you.

And so are you.

The Truth Does Not Need Your Help

There is an article circulating, calling into question some of the images and details that have been shared about the persecution in Iraq.  I'm thankful for it, because it's wise and measured, and because the pursuit of truth is important - but I'm nervous about the public's response to it. I am afraid that upon reading that one of the pictures that has been shared dates back to ISIS operations in Syria (not Iraq) last year (not this July), that people will think, "Oh, this has all been sensationalized.  No children are being killed in Iraq, or at least no more than are dying anywhere.  It is not that bad."

Because it is that bad.  It just isn't that picture.

I want to grab the shoulders of the people sneaking not-quite-exactly-right pictures into articles and say, "You are damaging your own cause!  You are causing the public to mistrust reports of a very real genocide.   This evil is bad enough without your having to darken it up for public consumption.  The truth does not need your help."

That's the crux of it.  The truth does not need your help.  The truth can stand on its own two feet, thank you very much.  The truth does not need you running PR for it.  When you spin truth, it's not truth anymore.  The only thing you have to do for the truth is tell it.

Regarding Iraq, the truth is that people are being beheaded.  People are being raped, shot, hanged, and crucified.  The truth is that nobody is coming to kill my babies today, and the truth is that Christians in Mosul and Northern Iraq can't say that - people ARE coming to kill them and their babies.  The truth is that families are fleeing into the mountains and starving to death, ISIS on their heels, coming after them with evil and lies and death in their hearts.  And that truth is enough,  no misplaced pictures of decapitated babies required.

The truth does not need your lying for it.  Will you bring this thought into your speech and your internet sharing and right into the heart of all of your relationships?  The truth does not need my help.

Let us not manipulate by exaggerating our hurt or our oppression.  Black is black enough without us sensationalizing it for shock value.  Be brave, step up to the mic, and tell the truth.  Speak loud and measured and long.  Tell us what happened, and why, and how.  Tell us how it made you feel.  And then step back and let the truth stand.  Discerning, compassionate people will come to stand beside you.

Let us not aim to impress by exaggerating our happiness and our blessings.   Be grateful, step up to the mic, and shout praise.  "I am blessed.  I am fortunate.  I am excited that this wonderful thing has happened for me."  Then step back and let the truth stand.  Discerning, joyful people will come rejoice with you.  None of us have the stomach for showmanship; it sours fast.

The truth does not need your shady advertising campaign.  When we hear truth, it grabs us.  I wrote last month about an inner truth cat.  I still think about my inner cat often, because it describes exactly the sensation I have when I hear the truth.  I can also liken it to a bear standing in a river catching fish.  I stand there, letting all the words and all the life flow over me, feeling...feeling...feeling...then I feel it.  THERE.  That's the true thing.   And I reach out and grab it.  That true thing is what I was after; that's what will feed me.

One of the books I read to my kids often is Demi's The Empty Pot.  It's about a little boy named Ping who grows the most beautiful flowers in China, but can't get a seed given to him by the emperor to grow.  Everyone teases him when he comes before the emperor, head bent low, with an empty pot.  The emperor then names Ping successor to the throne because Ping had the courage to appear before him with nothing but "the empty truth."

The empty truth.  I love that.

I want to have the courage to appear before the world with the empty truth.  I want to show up, every day, truth in hand, and let that be enough.  No fluff.  No lies.  No spin to make the dark a little darker, or the light a little lighter.  I want to say what I mean, mean what I say, and stand - head high and unafraid - because the truth is enough.

The only thing we need to do to the truth is tell it.

More from Kate about telling the truth:  "Honesty"

When Celebrities Die

I cannot yet tear myself away from the Robin Williams clips, movies, and interviews this week. When celebrities die we collectively gasp, then mourn.  For a few days we honor their lives by sharing our favorite bits of their work, the ways our lives were shaped by their willingness to live in the public eye.

Death is always mourned by the people who knew the life, and the more intimately we knew the life, the more deeply we mourn it.  Death is the epicenter of a great earthquake, and the mourning goes out in ripples, through the layers of knowing.

The thing about artists is, by definition, they give of themselves intimately in order to do their jobs.  Actors and musicians and writers – they weep, sweat, and bleed their work.

Ernest Hemingway said, "There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

When actors step into character, they rely on deeply personal things, hidden in the recesses of their minds, the depths of their souls, to authentically portray that sadness you’re seeing on the screen.  They could not do their jobs well if they did not bleed into their art; it would be flat.  Artists voluntarily prick at their own nerves.

This means that when we watch breakthrough performances, we are seeing real tension, real conflict of conscience, real love, real anger, real everything.  Whatever emotion you saw that took your breath – that CONNECTED with you – it was real.

The words in books and poems are real.  The heartbeat in music is real.  Artists live open wide to the world; that’s what makes them artists.  Celebrity, then, adds yet another layer of vulnerability.  Not only do artists draw on intimate personal experiences to bleed into their work – they live in a spotlight.  It’s The Truman Show for real.  We see them grocery shopping and at the beach and at basketball games and breastfeeding their babies.  They live wide open voluntarily for their art, and then again whether they want to or not because of the paparazzi and TMZ and your and my obsession with pop culture.

We KNOW them.  And largely, they allow us to know them.  They give themselves to us.

That’s why celebrity deaths affect us in a way that is often confusing.   It doesn’t seem proportional, at first.  We think, “I didn’t know this person.  They were just an actor, far away, on a screen.  Why do I feel like I am moving through molasses?”

(That’s how I felt when I heard about Robin Williams.  Grief slowed everything down, like it does.  The face Robin Williams made when he threw back his head and laughed was taking up all of my thoughts, so they came slower, like adding an extra space between all the letters on a page.   My mind was filled with Robin, and everything went into slow-motion.)

For a second I thought, “I didn’t know him,” but then I thought – “That’s silly.  Of course I did.”

I saw real joy, real struggle, and real depression, because Robin Williams was an artist.  Something inside of him bled into Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting.  His one little spark of madness, as he called it, poured ALL UP OVER Happy Days and Mrs. Doubtfire, and Aladdin.  Did you know that Aladdin was reportedly disqualified for “Best Adapted Screenplay” because Robin improvised so much of the Genie’s character that they couldn’t even call it a “script?”  He bled his stream-of-consciousness thoughts all over that piece of work and we saw it.  We got to know that bit of him.

We didn’t know all of him, of course.

I love how the French language distinguishes the word “to know.”  There is “savoir,” which is the information-kind of know.  I  know how to ride a bike.  I know how to do algebra.  But they never use “savoir” to describe a person, because people are not facts to be known.  People cannot be read like books.  The French use “connaître,” a to-be-familiar-with kind of know.  I know of this person.  I am ever-growing-in-knowing this person.  But I don’t information-know them.  People are deep and nuanced and ever-changing, every-minute, affected from without and within, like rivers.  We can never know them, we can only keep getting to know them.

We didn’t “savoir” Robin Williams.  We didn’t know everything he struggled with, or loved, or believed, or experienced.  But we “connaître-ed” him.  With every single public appearance, he kept on bleeding self and art for us, and we had the honor to keep getting to know him.

Our collective mourning of celebrities doesn’t mean we disproportionately disvalue the lives of the other people dying around the globe.  We don’t devalue children, or the persecuted, or the cancer warriors, or the noble, heroic, self-sacrificing soldiers.  Those of them we know we mourn hard and long and deep, and those we do not know, we mourn as appropriately as we can - because they matter, and their lives matter.

But the reason we’re all mourning Robin this week is because we KNEW him.

He wept and laughed and bled into his art, and then fame shone a bright light on him so we could all see.

It was an honor to know Robin Williams, and I am so, so grateful that he allowed me to know him, by giving of himself so tirelessly.  He brought incredible joy to my childhood, and I miss him.

Look Up (Why I Hated Women's Ministry)

I was in high school when I started hating women's ministry.   Not hating - I should say "getting annoyed by." I never cared for girls nights, and teas sounded downright dreadful, like being made to sit at the grown-up table after you were finished eating to "listen to us talk."

In college I started ministering to women, but I still didn't like women's ministry.  When I confessed that I didn't like it, as I sometimes did, I was met with confused or offended looks.  Wait, you're an RA for 70 girls at Liberty University and you don't like women's ministry?  Well, yeah.  I like hanging out and praying/teaching/learning.  I like organizing events, and writing curriculum, and discipling girls who really end up discipling me because that's how it works - but I don't like...teas.  Or doilies.  Or the book of Ruth, if we're being honest.

I didn't have words to express the rub.  Any time I attended a women's event, it wasn't BAD, it just wasn't...something.  Ten years later, I found some words.

This isn't a commentary on all women's ministries, or even the ones I was a part of growing up.   It's very likely that the problem was me.  But I know that I know that I know I'm not alone here.   So if you like Jesus but don't like church, or you like ministering to women, but you don't like women's ministry, maybe I can help put some words to the rub, maybe wipe the fog off of the glass so we can see what's really bugging us.

Here are the things that bored and irritated me about women's ministry:

• The book of Ruth (she was loyal and diligent and she got her prince!)
• Proverbs 31 (She got up early!  Taking care of a family and a home is hard and noble!  And look, she handled finances and worked outside of the home, too!  Equality!)
• Deborah (See?  God uses women, too!)
• Teas (Jesus loves you!  Pink!  Doilies!  Warm fuzzies!)
• Self-esteem seminars (You are beautiful just the way you are!  God loves you and that is all that matters!)

Here are the things I love about women's ministry:

• The book of Ruth (An allegory of Jesus Christ, who redeems us and comes for us who are abandoned and hopeless.)
• Proverbs 31 ("Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.")
• Deborah  (God calls us to radical courage, radical trust, radical purpose and obedience.  The battle, victory, and glory are His.)
• Teas (And by teas I mean barbeques.  This is a personal preference influenced by my distaste for cucumber sandwiches.  If you want to pamper me, do it with burgers.  Or smoothies.  I could get on board with a smoothie-tea.)
• Missions seminars  (There is a great love burning inside of us.  There is a great task at hand.  Let's get to work.)

When I take a step back and look, the problem is clear:

I don't like women's ministries that are about Christian womanhood. I like women's ministries that are about The Gospel.

And not The Gospel*

*for women.

Just The Gospel.

I was tired of looking at myself through a Jesus lens.  I just wanted to look at Jesus.

My freshman year of college (in a discussion with my Dad re: my new Bible Study book) I said, "I don't mind Esther, but... can we read ROMANS?"  I felt the tension way back then, I just couldn't articulate it.  I didn't have those words then, but I have them now.

I am tired of hearing about Christian womanhood.  I want to hear about God.

There are of course issues that are women's issues.  Womanhood is a sisterhood, and I don't need my femininity to be ignored; I need it to be seen and addressed and esteemed.  But women's issues are so, so secondary to gospel issues, because womanhood is so, so secondary to PERSONHOOD.  To child-of-God-hood.

To harp on my "women's issues" at the cost of ever having time to harp on the glory of God and the gospel of Jesus is to miss the whole darn thing.

So, if you think you don't like women's ministry, or church or whatever, maybe you're just tired of looking at yourself.

If you're OVER hearing how to be a better person and you wonder what's wrong with you because hearing that "you are a child of God" doesn't really move or impress you very much - you're not alone.  I was there too.   I suspect that we are all just starving for The Main Thing.

If that's you, be encouraged.  You're not missing it, you're getting it.   Just look up.   Find a community that looks, and talks, and points UP.

I love this, from Norman Douty (as quoted in The Complete Green Letters by Miles J. Stanford - a book that changed my life, given to me by a women's ministry leader that helped me look up)

"If I am to be like Him, then God in his grace must do it, and the sooner I come to recognize it the sooner I will be delivered from another form of bondage. Throw down every endeavor and say, I cannot do it, the more I try the farther I get from his likeness. What shall I do? Ah, the Holy Spirit says, you cannot do it; just withdraw; come out of it. You have been in the arena, you have been endeavoring, you are a failure, come out and sit down, and as you sit there behold Him, look at Him. Don't try to be like Him, just look at Him. Just be occupied with Him. Forget about trying to be like Him. Instead of letting that fill our mind and heart, let Him fill it. Just behold Him, look upon Him through the Word. Come to the Word for one purpose and that is to meet the Lord. Not to get your mind crammed full of things about the sacred Word, but come to it to meet the Lord. Make it to be a medium, not to Biblical scholarship, but of fellowship with Christ."

I still struggle.  It's so easy to forget.  This is a reminder to myself and to my own bored, distracted, divided heart.  Look up.  Stop looking at yourself and your life and your habits through Jesus-lens - and just look at glorious, radical King Jesus.

Survivor Playlist

Contents:

• 50 songs fit for survivors - spanning generations, moods, and genres.

Uses:

• 3-minute dance party.
• Lie motionless on the floor  with the feels.
• Scream "How you like me now?!" with  The Heavy.
• Turn it up so that the only thing you can feel is bass.
• Listen to "It is well with my soul" on repeat until you believe it.
• Get your Beyoncé on.

Enjoy!

***fist pumps around the room to Gloria Gaynor***

Kate

You can listen from here, or follow this link to open the playlist in Spotify.

The Survivor Series giveaway is still live!  Share a #survivorseries post for a chance to win $150+ in coffee, music, books, and other survival essentials.  Click here for details.

You guys, I wrote some books!  They’re really good and if you buy them and read them I will bake you cookies.*  You can get it on Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and in bookstores August 1.  

*and eat them myself because you live too far away.