Kate Hurley's Blog, page 3

Three Steps for Singles To Build Their Own Family (Part I: Giving Yourself to Others)

In this post and the next one, we are going to look at some ways that singles can build their own family. Today we are going to explore the idea of giving ourselves to others. Here are a few steps to get us on our way…

Step 1: Lift your eyes up to the mountains (Psalm 121:102) and away from your navel.

As singles, it is tempting to focus on ourselves and on our lack of love and family. We think about love, we talk about love, we read about love, we listen to love songs, we watch movies about love. No wonder we are semi-obsessed with the idea that romantic love is what will fill our insatiable desire for value and worth.

On one hand God is incredibly gracious towards our pain. He doesn’t question or downplay the difficult process we are walking through as singles. He knows that a desire for a companion comes from an incredibly deep place, and he validates how hard that is for us.

On the other hand, he knows that wallowing in our loneliness on a regular basis is destructive to our well being. Even more importantly, it distracts us from being our best, beautiful self to a world that desperately needs the love that we have to give.

In the book Singled Out, John Stott says,“The greatest danger [singles] face is self-centeredness. We may live alone and have total freedom to plan our own schedule, with nobody else to modify it or even give us advice. If we are not careful, we may find the whole world revolving around ourselves.”

It is important that we start doing the hard work of thinking about things other than our love life or lack thereof. We need to take active steps towards giving ourselves to others.

Step 2: Determine to understand God’s heart towards the lonely people that are around you and the poor throughout the world.

A few years ago, I did an exercise that shook me out of my self-absorbed bubble and made me realize how deeply God cares about the poor. I was listening to a teaching on biblical justice by Rob Morris, founder of Love146, a wonderful organization that fights child exploitation. He asked us to flip through the bible for ten minutes and write down every verse we found about loving the poor, the outcast, the orphan, or similar sentiments.  He asked us not to use a concordance or go to verses we already knew, but to just skim the pages.

I flipped to the Psalms and thought that maybe I should go somewhere else, because of course the Psalms were all about worship and wouldn’t have anything about biblical justice. But the first verse I read was “Blessed is he who considers the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble” (Psalm 41:1.) I kept reading through the Psalms and found verses about the poor everywhere.

It made sense that they were everywhere, because there are about 2,000 verses on this topic. It is one of  the most talked about topics in the Bible. I have never looked at the bible the same way again. Verses about taking care of the poor are everywhere I look.

If the God that I love is this passionate about loving the lonely, maybe I would be wise to for me to be passionate about it as well. 

After your read this post, consider doing this exercise yourself, either with friends or on your own. You will be amazed at what you find.

Step 3: Pick one or two causes that you will devote yourself to.

I know there are a million causes that want your resources. A million different ministries vying for your attention. It can be overwhelming to hear all of the statistics. Sometimes you don’t know where to look. You don’t know if you can make a difference, so you don’t look anywhere. You look away.

But behind these causes are real people with real faces and real voices and real senses of humor and real tears.

My advice for you is to prayerfully choose one or two of these causes and be passionate about it for the rest of your life. Learn about your cause. Introduce yourself to the people that are behind that cause. Find out what you and your friends can do to make a difference.

Don’t just feed at a soup kitchen, come out from the serving line and sit and eat with the precious people you have served. Don’t just give money to an organization that fights child exploitation, find out how to write to the kids in the safe home and get to know them.

Shane Claiborne says in his book, The Irresistible Revolution, “What our world is desperately in need of [is] lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.”

Over the last years since doing the poor verse exercise, much of my life has been spent thinking about and acting on taking care of the poor. The two issues most dear to me are homeless travelers and inner city youth. I have done outreaches all over the country to bring love to traveling people, especially new agers. I have taught music classes and made CDs for homeless youth. I have chosen to be “homeless” for 3 days to understand what my friends go through. I have played music for homeless church services and with homeless in the park and for homeless funerals. I have done advocacy work with homeless women, helping them find jobs and housing and medical help.

I just moved to San Diego to live in a missional community (beta communities.org) and I also plan to teach music classes to teenage refugees. I am so excited about this. I don’t have my own children, but I can give love to these precious souls.

These things have become some of the deepest joys of my life. They don’t exactly fill the void that I feel because I don’t have a traditional family, but they bring me joy and meaning in a different way. I desperately need to be less lonely, and so do they. But I had to take the initiative for these things to happen.

In conclusion,  you can’t really control your love life or lack thereof. But you can control the love that you put out into the world.

As Mother Teresa put it, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.”

Let’s remember that we belong to each other. Let’s love other people enough to remind them that we belong to each other. Maybe then we would finally have some peace, even if we don’t yet have the traditional family we’ve always wanted.

Filed under: Body Image, Desiring Family, Social Justice Tagged: justice

A Love-Hate Letter to Christmas

Dear Christmas,

I am writing this letter to tell you how I feel. I have been bottling up these emotions for most of my adult life. It is time to show up and tell my truth to you.

To put it bluntly: I love you and I hate you.

The early years with you were so memorable. We would get together with my mom and make wheat-germ and whole-wheat cookies in your honor. (Just because you were in the room didn’t mean she was going to give up her health fanatic ways.)

We would go with my dad to cut trees together, a memory I still hold close to my heart now that he’s gone.

When I was a teenager, Christmas, we were so mischievous with each other. Every year I would get the big box of presents from Aunt Susan. My parents were divorced then, so it was my responsibility to wrap her presents for the family. Inevitably, Aunt Susan would give my brother Will really nice pairs of jeans, and I would get shorts sewn together to a tank top like a 90s teenage onesie. We would wrap the jeans and write on the tag that Aunt Susan gave them to me. Sometimes we’d even give the onesie to my brother. We would laugh. In fact, we were laughing all the way.

But then I started getting older. College passed, and I still didn’t have a family of my own. The gift of a family was still there, wrapped with a bow, under the tree. But I wasn’t allowed to open it yet. For years, my anticipation would grow like a child on Christmas Eve. “Maybe it will be this year!” I would think. But years passed, and that present was still there, unopened. I grew from excitement to frustration to barely even caring any more.

During that season I would go to my brother and sister-in-law’s house for Christmas since they were the closest thing I had to my own family. Will and I would put on puppet shows for my nephews and niece, complete with Latino accents, while singing No Tacos For Christmas. The kids would belly laugh for a full hour. I loved it because I loved them. But I also kind of hated it because it made me want my own kids so much.

Years passed. You sang “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” to me over and over and over again. And then you would sing it some more. On the radio, in the mall, on TV. “Please, please get a new song!” I would yell at you. It drove me crazy. That’s when I really started to hate you.

But then you would quietly sing “Silent Night” to me, candles lit, with all our friends around, and it would never get old. I would start to love you again.

Every year, I would love your season, because I had friends to be with and parties to go to and concerts to put on.

I would love thinking about the incredible miracle of the incarnation—that the God who could not be contained by eternity placed himself in a little baby so we could hold him close to our hearts.

I loved that. So much. It gave me hope. It made me realize I wasn’t alone.

And in that space, I would almost love you again. But then your actual day would come, and every single time it would make me feel so lonely. I would have to scramble to find somewhere to go. This was the day that you would remind me, more than any day of the year, that I didn’t have a husband, that I didn’t have kids. It felt like you were scoffing at me.

I would love to tell you that I have finally learned to love you. I would love to tell you that remembering Jesus is enough for me to feel peaceful again. I would love to tell you that I like fruitcake.

All those things are true and not true at the same time. For the most part, I am more peaceful than I used to be. I see that gift of a family, still wrapped under the tree, and I am not as angry that I can’t open it yet. I have even accepted that I might not ever open it. I am not happy about it, but I am seeing more and more that I can still have a beautiful life.

But then, after all that emotional work is done and all that acceptance occurs, something happens. Like when I watch the kids at my after-school program exploding with excitement and anticipation, and I wish I could have my own children doing the same thing. Like when I see a couple kiss under the mistletoe. Like when I am shuffled around to households by people whole love me, but am painfully aware that I am not in their first circle of family. I can’t help but feel like a nuisance at times.

So Christmas, I can’t tell you that I will ever come to love you. Perhaps it’s good for me to choose to love the beautiful side of you as much as possible. Perhaps I should let myself grieve the bad parts of you and not be frustrated at myself for being sad. It’s okay to love you, and it’s okay to hate you.

As Cheryl Strayed says, “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go.

“Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

Sincerely,

Kate

P.S. I really appreciate that you stopped singing “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” so much. I see that you have tried so hard by replacing it with the more “modern” Mariah Carey song, “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” But I have news for you: 1994 is not modern. And that song is getting almost as annoying as the other one.

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