Tag: Love

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Born to be an angel

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Six years ago, I wandered into a youth group service and took a seat in the last row of chairs in a crowded high school gym. The transformation that happened in my life that night– the night I became a Christian– was more powerful than I could ever put into words. But something else changed in my life that night too.

As I sat back and scanned the gym full of rowdy teenagers, some of whom I had gone to school and grown up with, my eyes settled on the bright red hair of the girl sitting in the row in front of me. “Hey!” I said, as I kicked the back of her chair, causing her to turn around and look at me. “I like your hair. It’s pretty crazy, but it’s cool.” The girl’s face lit up and she smiled as she shyly said, “Thanks” and went back to the conversation that she had been having with the girl next to her.

Later that night, as I sat crying on the floor of the gym during worship, pouring my heart out to God for the first time, I felt someone put their arm around me. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the strange red-haired girl was sitting by my side, hugging me and crying out to God too.

At the time I didn’t know it, but that strange, wordless interaction on the floor of the Aurora Christian Academy gym was the beginning of one of the most beautiful friendships I have ever known.

I found out later that night that the red-haired girl had a name– Danielle. Dani for short.

I found out in the days and weeks after that night that Dani and I were incredibly similar, and it wasn’t long until we were nearly inseparable.

Over the next several years, we celebrated the small victories in our new walks with Jesus together… and we cried together when we failed. We held each other accountable in late night conversations and we became more like sisters than friends.

But unfortunately, neither of us were perfect and over time, we began to drift away from God, and each other, and in new directions; none of which were particularly healthy.

Around this time, I began college and subsequently “more exciting” things began to attract my attention. As I pulled away, Dani stopped trying to hold me accountable for my stupidity and it was only a matter of time until she had fallen back into her old habits as well.

As time passed, we became a duo of a different kind– the Pharisaical kind.  We were insistent on tearing the other one down by pointing out all of the sin in the others’ life– all in a concerted effort to make ourselves feel better about the amount of sin and pain in our own lives.

This tit-for-tat pattern wore our friendship raw for months on end. It seemed like I had lost my best friend over night, but we both knew that that wasn’t the truth. We both made poor choices and it took nearly a year of us digging at the others’ soul to come to a place of truce. But even in this treaty, neither of us were ready to give up the horrible messes of lives that we had reconstructed for ourselves. So instead of asking each other the hard questions when we talked at night, we would talk about school and boys, friends and what was on tv.

It was during this period of truce that both of our lives completely dissolved around us and because we were living on a superficial level instead of the sisterly bond that we both knew existed, neither of us were willing to cry “Uncle!” and let the other know how desperately we needed to talk about the tough stuff; how desperately we needed God.

And it was during this period that I got the phone call; my first phone call of 2011; the phone call telling me that Dani had committed suicide.

I could easily write a blog entry today, on her birthday, about the depravity and injustice of suicide, how angry I was at myself for being so petty, and the how much I desperately miss her… and all of those things would be true. But I’m not going to.

Instead, I wanted to write today to let everyone who reads this know that Dani was the most beautiful, loving, gracious soul I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.

I want you to know that Dani could put a smile on anyone’s face and had no qualms about being incredibly goofy if it meant that she would make you giggle.

I want you to know that Dani had such a tender heart that she shaved her head when she heard that one of our friends had cancer and was losing her hair from radiation treatments.

I want you to know that Dani was fearless and sang in a regional worship competition, even though she knew that people were going to make fun of her behind her back.

I want you to know that Dani radiated the love of Christ in the midst of persecution and humiliation throughout high school, and after.

And I want you to know that while Dani struggled, hard and long with the scars of abuse and addiction, that she loved God and believed whole heartedly in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.

Today, Dani wouldn’t want us to weep; Instead, she would want us to go out and be a light to the broken of the world, just like she was to me the night that we met on the rubber gym floor of ACA.

So if you’re reading this and struggling, please know that you’re not alone. Reach out to someone; reach out to God.

Humans are fallible– my friendship with Dani proved this– But God will not fail you, not even when you’re broken and at your worst. Not even when everyone else has.

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

~Psalm 73:26

[On your birthday, I honor you Babydoll. Not a day has gone by that you haven’t been on my mind or my heart since you moved away to Heaven. I love you & can’t wait for the day when we get to worship, side-by-side once again. Love, Kace]

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In a Relationship

I love Summer.

The days are longer, the air is warmer, and maybe it’s just me, but early morning iced coffee and late night ice cream with friends just seems sweeter.

I know that part of my love affair with summer has to do with the fact that I’m young and single. While I lay in a hammock in the California sunshine typing this, I have been switching back and forth to my Facebook where many of my young married friends with children have been chattering about plans to head to the swimming pool, the zoo, the museum, ect. For many, summer seems like a time to hit the ground running, but being in the stage of life that I am, Summer is a time for me to head the opposite direction and slow down.

Without lessons to be planned, papers to grade, or my own homework to do, I have had the pleasure of being able to fill my time with other things these first few weeks of summer vacation.

In the last month, I’ve read more for pleasure and have been able to go out to coffee and have some amazing heart-to-heart talks with friends, both new and old. I’m an incredibly relational person and there are few things that nurture my soul quite like building relationships with the people I love.

My favorite “over coffee” question? “What is God doing in your life right now?”

Roughly three months ago when one of my friends first asked me this question, I was semi-paralyzed. Shoot, I don’t know… I thought, right before my mind went entirely blank.

God seemed so big and abstract. I couldn’t really pinpoint anything specific that He was doing in my life.

But my dear friend (who shall remain nameless) takes a certain amount of joy in watching me squirm in challenging conversations, and week in and week out, he would ask me this until I had an answer. After a few weeks of healthy nudging, I realized something.

Maybe I couldn’t always pinpoint what God was doing in my life because my relationship with Him wasn’t very strong…

After all, I knew exactly what all my friends were doing with their lives because I spent all of my free time talking to them over coffee, but I had never considered doing the same thing with my Creator everyday.

Our Father is a relational God who created us to be in relationship with Him. (Weird how that works, huh?) As Jamie West Zumwalt says in her book Simple Obsession, God didn’t create us because He needed someone/something else to serve Him; He had the angels for that.

God created Adam and Eve and walked through the Garden of Eden with them everyday, simply because He could. God gave us His Son so that He could walk among and beside us. God put the Holy Spirit within all of His believers so that we could experience true unity with Him.

God wants our hearts. He wants our time. He wants to be in a relationship with us.

Think about it. When you begin a new relationship, you spend all of your time getting to know that person. You want to know what they think, what they love, what their heart longs for. And to do this, you have to spend quality time with them.

This quality time looks different for every couple. I have friends who have gotten to know their future husbands and wives over city adventures, coffee dates, dinners, movies, training for marathons, and all kinds of other crazy activities. But the important thing is never the activity planned, but the time spent together.

If we can find the time to spend quality time with our friends and loved ones, why not set aside time to date God? Pour your heart out to Him and listen to what He tells you. Begin building an intimate, loving relationship with your Creator.

It may seem strange, but this summer, I’m dating God. One cup of coffee and conversation at a time, we’re getting acquainted in new ways, through both His Word and my words. And let me tell you, it is a beautiful process.

Where is God working in your life this Summer? Is He calling you into closer relationship with Himself?

~

“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us.”

~1 John 4:10

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[Eat,] Pray, Love

Roughly three years ago, a book came out and seemed to (at least temporarily) revolutionize our static American culture. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert was a gutsy self-help-esque book centered around the idea of “doing what you need to do to be happy”. (You know, standard “Oprah’s Book Club” stuff…)

On her journey to “finding herself” Elizabeth exposes her darkest secrets to her audience, and after ripping her own heart out and allowing it to bleed all over the pages for a while, she eats a lot of Italian food, takes a trip to India, and is suddenly able to sew herself back up, and viola! After a divorce, a family feud, and a few bad relationships, she is magically fixed!

Now, if you’re thinking that I sound skeptical, you would be 1,000% correct.

During the time that this book was all the rage, my life had essentially caught on fire and everything (and everyone) that I valued had either disappeared or had been removed for one reason or another. Everyone except the gentleman (hardly…) that I was dating at the time.

I was desperately seeking happiness and figured that if Elizabeth Gilbert was able to find happiness in her journey, that I might be able to get some happiness by proxy if I read her book.

I bought it, kept it in my purse, and struggled to enjoy the first third of the book. But there was simply nothing about her journey that seemed to bring me any joy; In fact, I only seemed to be slipping further down the rabbit hole of “blah”.

In an effort to speed up the process of rediscovering my happiness and myself, I decided to buy the movie when it came out on DVD (I’m an American, what can I say? Instant gratification is what we’re all about, right?). But even the movie put me to sleep– literally. I’ve tried to watch it on several occasions and have never made it past the second section when she’s in India.

For months and months, I continued to struggle to find some source of happiness. It wasn’t until I was given no other choice than to give up my comfortable lifestyle with my then-boy-toy and try to stand alone that I completely shattered.

If I was unhappy before the split, I was barely human after it. When my life had crumbled around me for the previous year, I had poured myself into making my relationship work. His friends became my friends. His interests became my interests. Heck, I even began reading the same books as him, simply so we would have some common ground amid our dysfunction.

After the break-up, I did the logical thing: I looked where society said that I would find happiness and I went after that. To my dismay, Eat, Pray, Love was still what the world was telling me would “fix me”. So I gave it another shot.

Pathetic and broken, I sat on my back patio and forced myself to re-read the book when this nifty quote jumped out at me for the first time:

“Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that’s not fair to say. To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time—everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else. I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how it’s always been.

Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, “You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.”

It was like Elizabeth Gilbert was reading my mail!

I had become so much like all of the people around me that I literally lost “me”. Sitting in my backyard that day, I began to wonder who “I was” before I had gotten invested in all of the people in my life.

The first thought that came to my mind was “I was a follower of Christ” and the second thought almost made me sick to my stomach– “I was…”

I had been so busy following other people, tending to other people, trying to love other people (many against their will), that I had stopped following, loving, and pursuing Christ.

The years since that revelation have been rocky, but now as I sit here and think about my life, I can see that I have lost myself in someone once again… People think I’m crazy, but I am in love.

I am head over heels for my Creator and I am working everyday to give him everything that I have. My time, my devotion, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money [Sorry, Charlie], my dog’s time… I am working hard to ensure that all of it goes to furthering His Kingdom.

My previously non-existent boundaries still don’t really exist, but I care less about that now. I have a peace that passes all understanding. I have the joy that I was so desperately seeking in other people. I have a wonderful, flourishing relationship with Christ and through Him, I have found my worth and my joy again.

I’ve still never read, or seen Eat, Pray, Love all the way through (and I likely never will) but I’m grateful for the bizarre way that God used it to pull me back into my relationship with himself.

All of this to ask my question of the week:

When people look at you today, who do they see? Are you reflecting your spouse? Do you look like your dog? Or are you a mirror of your Father in Heaven?

Who have you lost yourself in? And are you happy with that decision?

~

 “I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.” (~Elizabeth Gilbert)

Maybe Elizabeth Gilbert was onto something there… It all sounds so familiar…

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~Romans 8:38

“It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you.” ~Deuteronomy 31:8

Need I go on?

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Learning to be Content on my Continent

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In the last year, God has brought me an entirely new group of friends. These people hail from all over the United States, have different backgrounds, interests, and stories, but we are united under one commonality; our love for our Lord, Jesus Christ.

God has used my new friends to heal me of deep wounds, break me for new people groups, and re-ignite a fire in my heart for knowledge, travel, and community– needless to say, it has been an emotional roller coaster of  a year on my end, but I have loved every single moment of it because these wonderful people have been by my side through it all.

This summer I have said many temporary good-byes as my amazing new friends set off to change our world. From Chile to South Africa, North America to Asia, we have spread ourselves thin, searching for new experiences and longing to meet and love our current and future brothers and sisters in Christ.

To say that I’m proud of my adventurous compadres, doesn’t even being to cover it. But I must confess that I have been sorting through some level of jealousy and longing to be in their shoes.

My soul longs to be out of this country, feeding the poor, counseling young women who have suffered abuse, building wells, playing volleyball in the streets of Peru again… anything for His Kingdom… anywhere but here.

But today while I was sitting on the patio of one of my favorite coffee shops, I heard Him whisper somewhere in the depths of my “longing” soul. “I have you exactly where you need to be. Do not long for someone else’s journey. Your journey is equally beautiful in my sight, that is why I created it, just for you.”

How often do we wish we could be in someone else’s shoes?

How often do I envy other’s lives instead of taking the time to simply appreciate the one that He has given me?

While I may not be spending my summer wading through swamps along the Amazon to bring food to the needy or counseling victims of genocide and war on the other side of the world, I am making an impact here on American soil for my King, and I need to keep that in mind.

Taking my students out to lunch is making an impact in their lives, even if it is only a small one. Dedicating my weekends to fellowship and uplifting my fellow believers here in ‘Merica is just as important as doing the same thing in Scotland. There are homeless, hopeless, and needy people right here at my doorstep; this is my summer to serve them. Maybe next year God will have something else in mind for me… maybe not. Either way the cards fall, I’m working on being content with where God has me.

So I leave you with this thought:

Where is God using you this summer? How are you making yourself available to Him exactly where you are?

~

“For there will never cease to be poor in your land. Therefore, I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.”

(Deuteronomy 15:11)

 

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A Letter to a Five Year Old…

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Dear JR,

Five years ago today, my world changed.

I was driving back to Denver after a missions trip to the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, when I got a text message from your mom that read something to the effect of “GET HERE NOW!” with a picture of a teensy tiny baby boy tangled in wires and tubes– you had just been born, a month early.

I frantically drove home as quickly as I could and my first stop once I was back in the city was Children’s Hospital. You were waiting for me in a small incubator with an orange tag reading “Isaac Maurice Martinez, Junior” taped near your feet. Tiny and perfect you opened your eyes and I was in love for the second time in my life.

The doctors told us you might not make it, or that you would be in the hospital for months on the off chance that you did… But you were a fighter and were out of the hospital and into the world in seemingly no time at all.

I used to sit on the sofa in your mom’s house & rock you back and forth late at night, trying to create some comfort in your insanely turbulent world. You were never fussy, even in the midst of the screaming and chaos that took place in your home. You would just lay in my lap and smile at me with your bright green eyes and rosy little lips, and I would melt. I pray that today, five years later that you still have that same beautiful, calm disposition. I pray that God has brought you into a new family where “abuse” never becomes a part of your vocabulary and 911 aren’t the first numbers that you can string together.

Today I might not be able to give you a birthday cake, a present, or even a hug, but I can (and will) send a bundle of prayers up to the Big Guy for you, as I have everyday since you and Mary Ray left my arms. I don’t know what you’re “into” now; maybe you still love animals, maybe you’ve become more of a car guy… Either way, I hope your new family is spoiling you rotten today.

I hope you know that no matter how dysfunctional our tiny family has become, or how many miles we are separated by, that I love you to the end of the universe and back, and that is why I made the choice for you and your sister that I did. I had to give you up so that you could have a chance to make it to your 5th, 10th, & 50th birthdays; I had to give you up even though it just about killed me.

Happy 5th birthday baby. I’ll be loving you always…

Forever,

your Momma K