Entrusted

Growing up I was set on being a lawyer. A big bad lawyer that would come in and always save the day with elegant arguments, extensive research, and an innate passion to fight the good fight for people. I think the love came from a few Jodi Picoult books I read in middle school. She wrote impactful stories from the viewpoint of the characters being defended along with the lawyer doing the work of defending. She portrayed their work as honest and pure and I was sure that that was my calling. I was an avid arguer destined to be a debate team standout. My mom always joked that I should pursue law since I enjoyed fighting with her all the time (sorry mom...I was an angry and entitled kid). I think I was deterred from my "calling" when I realized I could potentially be defending people I didn't believe were innocent. Now, in line with my fighting spirit, I am an accountant. Life comes at you fast.

But one thing about this desire growing up has never left me and the idea behind being entrusted with the position of fighting for someone & recognizing that we are fought for every day.

The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still. Exodus 14:14. 

Growing up I had a best friend named Lilly who would always strategically invite me to church. We would have sleepovers on Saturday nights and I would be forced to wake up and go to church with her family. I would make excuses every time how I didn't have clothes to wear or I didn't know anyone there but always found myself tagging along against my will. This wasn't just a one-time instance but it happened routinely. She wasn't afraid of pushing me along to Christ when I wasn't willing to step out of my comfort zone and do it for myself. This continued into high school when she forced me to go on a week long summer trip to Illinois with 40 or 50 other random strangers that I had never met because she wanted me to know Jesus. She had friends in the youth group and she certainly didn't need insecure 16-year-old me there to enhance her experience. She fought for me to have a relationship with Jesus. She knew how much it changed her life and she refused to let those she loves settle for anything less. The following year she forced me to attend the church camp again when I was preoccupied with the fact that I would miss and entire week of workouts for fall sports. Because of that camp, I made the decision to get baptized and my entire life's trajectory began to change. All because Lilly showed up and fought for me. She knew the importance of Jesus in my life and fought for me. I didn't realize it then but it's much clearer now; God was fighting to know me and used my best friend to fight for my heart.

I've been pretty reckless and easily led astray throughout the years. Following my own desires and motivations led me into plenty of places of self-doubt and darkness. Sometimes developing a new relationship with Jesus looks a lot like asking if He really is there hearing us and bringing us the life promised to us or if it's just us constantly missing out on the shiny things this world has to offer. Satan does his job.

In every season of discouragement and doubt, people have shown up & fought. Countless times people have shown up and fought on behalf of my relationship with Jesus. Sometimes it takes much longer than we are hoping for and our seasons of discouragement are so unbearable that we refuse to welcome the light when it finally shines back in our direction. But God fights harder for us. He leads us to books we need to read to change our hearts, music we need to break down over, and people are entrusted to call the potential out of us. He finds ways to fight for us & our hearts most of the time without us understanding what is happening until much later.

I am so thankful for those that showed up and fought for me. Strangers, friends, teachers, colleagues, coaches...none received any immense gain from fighting for my relationship with Jesus. Some of them weren't even aware that that was the role they had in my life. Just as God sends people out to do this for us, He calls us to do this for others. He calls us to show up and give to others and lead them back to Him. To sacrifice our pride, our time, our reputations, our feelings, our desires in order to show up and act on behalf of others and fight for their walk with Jesus. To adequately prepare ourselves and our character so we can give to others when they need it most. I've been trying hard to focus on this lately when taking the extra time to be with God in scripture or in prayer gets to be mundane. I try to think not of the benefit I will receive, but maybe God will entrust me to relay what I am learning here back to someone else who needs to hear it more than I do right now. That if I am entrusted with a moment that someone else needs me to fight for them, that I am ready & equipped. That I have the courage to act because a life lived for others is one worth remembering in the end.

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act. Proverbs 3:27. 

Pain

I've always believed I feel too much. I've always felt so deeply about things that I never really had any connection to or reason to be effected. Old people eating alone, kids lost in supermarkets, girls crying at the bars, homeless people in the cold, skinny kids wondering where their next meal would come from. All these things I honestly believe break all of our hearts I can never seem to quite get off my mind. I keep stationery in my backpack just in case I get the courage to write a letter to people my heart can't seem to stop thinking about.

Shootings in schools, moms with cancer, opportunities taken from kids to go to college, friends in pain. The list can go on. We live in a broken world and it just seems to be getting more lost as we get older. My heart breaks and breaks for the things that aren't changing and I find myself believing that I can't be the one to change it all, so I don't move.

But my heart still experiences the pain of all these situations. It's always bothered me, these lingering feelings of hurt for situations and tragedies that I can't change. How I can't ever seem to get them off my mind and I'm always thinking of ways I could take action. Completing a research paper instead of being out in the world doing service projects and being hands-on in the healing of others. With all the broken people out in the world, it feels selfish to sit still and work on myself day after day instead of giving away my life to others as we are called to.

But with all this learning comes hope. This time of learning and being surrounded in community is so important. I see my peers learning and bettering themselves to go out into the world and actually change it. I see my peers become my role models and use their voices for good. Seniors who are leaving soon speaking up on behalf of the thousands of kids in the future who will hopefully see UNK as a valid option to further their education. Colleagues dreaming of using their degrees to make the world a better place, not just make a career. People around me who actually want to get out there and do stuff, not just sit back and let others take the lead. I think the world has always needed more than that and I believe our generation is going to be the ones to do it.

The world has never needed us more than it does now. We are broken and so so lost. I want to write this letter as an encouragement to all the feelers out there. Let the things break your heart. Cry with those you love and cry with those who are strangers. Let the things that break your heart keep you up at night. The world needs more of that. We have enough indifference, we need more compassion. Let the things that matter to you consume your mind. Use your strengths and your gifts to go out there and do something in the world, change it and make it just a little better than before. We weren't made to just go through this life without impacting others. We are God's workmanship prepared in advance to get out there and impact the world for Jesus (Ephesians 2:10). To remind one another to keep going and to keep fighting and using our talents to further God's kingdom.

I encourage you to keep going regardless of the fact that you might look a little weird when you care and love others without an agenda, without asking for anything in return. People will question and doubt your motives but the world needs your love more than it ever has. Just start where you are. Start in your families, in your communities, on your sports teams, in your honors organizations, in your classrooms. Get out there and let your heart feel for all the brokenness around us and let it truly change you. Jesus's heart broke for you so let your heart break for the world, let it call you to action. Let's get out there and do the work.

What once was full of sorrow
Your love turned into good
What once left me in pieces
Your strength restored in full

Decisions

Coming to the end of your college career is a strange feeling. Feelings of nostalgia start to creep in and linger in my daily thoughts. I find myself clinging to the comfort of the mundane and the familiarity of the habits I've picked up over the last four years, but also finding solace in things coming to an end. Seasons come and seasons go, I was just lucky to have a great one for the last four years that I'm going to miss dearly.

But with the ending of the seasons comes decisions, with decisions come questions, with questions come pressure. Decisions to be made over where to live next, what career path to follow, to keep pursuing relationships or decide you've outgrown them, graduate school, marriage. All these decisions to be made in the next few months that will ultimately dictate the life I'll have in the future. The weight of these decisions are heavy on me.

There is a constant pressure around me to keep up with my peers. I have intentionally tried to surround myself with people who have things figured out so they can either inspire me to do better and discipline myself or just drag me along beside them when I don't have the motivation to do it on my own. Some of my greatest role models and inspirations have been people I sit next to in class or my roommates. Seeing people go after their dreams is contagious.

But comparison creeps in. Seeing great people receive fantastic job offers or move across the country to continue their lives is intimidating when you don't have all the details figured out yet. I constantly find myself asking, should I be doing that too? Should I be applying for that prestigious internship, should I be going to grad school? Should I be moving somewhere new? Why doesn't my life look like his yet? Why don't I have everything figured out? It becomes hard not to think less of your life when you haven't been able to commit to a decision and chase after it. Chances are the people who have the dream job have had their career path decided a little before you did. Stop comparing.

I remember when I picked my major. At the time, I didn't believe I was really good at anything or really passionate about programs that my college had to offer. I knew I loved math and I knew I needed to help people in my future career. Business was a "go-to" major for most kids like me who didn't have an epiphany when they were 12 that they wanted to be a neuroscientist or be a firefighter or an engineer. "You can do anything with business" people always said, so business and finance it was. My major was decided. I'm still not entirely sure where this major will take me or who I will ultimately become studying finance, but something tells me not to quit.

When people ask what I want to do with my finance major, I simply say I just want to help people. That's it. There's no detailed plan or path I see ahead of me. I haven't made any decisions or taken any jobs. I'm clinging to the promise that God has my future and that I shouldn't worry too much about where I'm headed as long as He is at the root of all of it.

Jesus doesn't care nearly as much about the perfection of our decisions as He does the heart behind them.

God has placed in my heart for as long as I can remember a deep compassion for others and a heart that loves to solve. A heart for the church and a heart for investing in others, doing all I can to help make other people's lives easier. It's taken me years to realize this within myself because the world tells us we should constantly be focusing on our lives and making our little kingdoms as glorious as they can be. But my passion is what it is, and it needs to be my direction instead of my detailed plan. Some of the coolest things in life didn't happen because of a plan, but because God willed them to happen. I need to make decisions to follow what gives me joy instead of following what success looks like to the world.

I haven't made any life-changing decisions and I'm still not sure what life my education has set me up for. I know I'll make my fair share of mistakes along the way and do things that fail. But with every decision I need to remind myself what my purpose is and if this decision is pulling me towards that passion or pulling me more towards glorifying myself.

My decisions don't need to be perfect to be right. My life doesn't have to look perfect to have purpose. And I don't need to overanalyze every move I make. Just find the next step in following what you're passionate about, and just do that. Even when it all seems intimidating and unattainable, find the next step and complete it.

We don't need to take huge leaps towards our dreams, we end up missing the journey that way.

Keep it simple - just find the next step and do it.

Mountains

My life has been riddled with failures since this senior semester started. Not just my typical fail a test here, get in a fight with your best friend there type of failure but instead a full-blown, every avenue of life failure. To the point of mental paralyzation, where I don't know what my next move is supposed to be, where even praying doesn't seem to alleviate the mass amounts of failure that have surprised me.

God has been moving mountains around my life. But not just moving them, He has been destroying them. Bringing complete ruin to mountains at the core of my being and just letting them fall, avalanche after avalanche. He continues to prove to me that my identity is not at all what I have built it up to be. This fabricated mountain I have believed Him to be the artist behind when this entire time it's been me crafting the strokes and designing the picture I've believed He wants to see. God is humbling me, teaching me that you can't cling to mistakes just because you've spent a lot of time and put your heart into making them.

These failures have come in school, sports, friendships, family, relationships, health, and even my faith. I used to classify myself as smart and could always find a teacher or professor who believed I was bright; now everyone is smarter than me, knows exponentially more than I do and I am increasingly aware of my inability to keep up with my academic peers. My health has failed me. I take the medications and do the routines my doctors suggest to handle my autoimmune disease but still wind up exhausted by noon. Friendships I thought would never be shaken have been tested and nearly let go; intentionality is lost and I have failed people closest to me. The one thing I used to be able to rely on to be good at was my athletic ability but I have lost it. I have trained my whole life to get to this point and somehow failed along the way and lost a part of my identity I always thought I could rely on. I've questioned God, gotten furious why all these things that have brought me joy, peace, acceptance, and understanding of my purpose have been creating turmoil and an identity crisis within me.

Through all these failures I can only find it in me to selfishly ask God one question:

God why have you failed me?

Because for some reason my heart believes that when I am not achieving what I think God wants for me that He is somehow failing me. I get angry at God when He doesn't paint the picture I want Him to paint in my life. All these things I once believed could simply be perfected through hard work and a little bit of heart He has shown that He is still in control. My heart has been broken through the loss and devastation exposed by my failures.

But our God is loving. He is always rooting for us, even in our failures. God wants us not to fail lightly, but He needs us to fail fully. Like fall on your face, no options left failure. No one to call, no worldly lifelines to use. Failure that shakes us to our core, that brings us to a new level of honest with ourselves.

God can use our failures way more than He can use our successes.

God brings us to failure to show us that we don't need to be perfect at everything in order for us to glorify His kingdom. We just need to bring what we have and lay it all out for Him and let Him use the broken, shattered pieces to bring people to Him. We need to let Him work within us. Allow ourselves to let go of things He has shown us we weren't using to glorify anyone but ourselves and allow Him to rule over those areas of our lives for Him to be glorified fully. To give up our identities, our talents, our passions and let Him use them fully for building His kingdom instead of us clinging to them for our own gain. To not hide our failures from Him or from the world, because the world needs more real and God needs your failures. We need to get to the end of ourselves and rip up the paintings we paint in the image we believe He has for us.

We need to give God rule over our lives and what He has planned. Sometimes we realize this on our own, but sometimes this takes our lives being shaken for us to realize what we have been doing. We need to fail in order to grow and learn, to humble ourselves before the Lord and say God please use this to glorify Your kingdom. Use this failure to reach someone and to bring them to Christ, to help someone feel less alone and less like a failure themselves.

God has used these failures in me to help let go of the life I've had planned for myself & He will continue to use them. He will use them to help me give up parts of myself I have held so dearly for self-glorification so He can use those broken & treasured parts of me to help glorify His kingdom. To bring my joy back to being in Him and my identity in simply being His.

Because our lives don't start until we come to the end of ourselves and beg God use my life, my failures, and my talents.

God use me.

Testimony

Let's begin with some introductions.

My name is Kait. I am 21 years old and a student at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. I am going into my senior year of schooling, although I might have to be a super senior. I am studying finance and mathematics so essentially I'm a super nerd. I am a member of the UNK volleyball team, a student leader of UNK's FCA, a member of the Honor's Program, and Social Media Chair of Mortar Board. I love to read, enjoy sunsets, and go on outdoor adventures. I am a Gryffindor and would most likely be the first person killed in the Hunger Games.

I could also accurately introduce myself as Moses. Not that I'm a big part of the Bible and God talks to me through burning plants. But because I try to tell God not to choose me.

"So go. I will be with you when you speak. I will give you the words to say." But Moses said, "My Lord, I beg you to send someone else, not me." Exodus 4:12-13 (ERV)

I remember reading this and thinking whoa, God has just called me out. God just subtweeted me but through the Bible as He does. In every season of my life, in most situations that have been difficult, in trials, and in praises, I have nearly always asked God to choose someone else. I'm not qualified, I don't have a platform made for this, people don't respect me or listen to me here, nobody knows who I am. I have allowed myself my entire life to repeat these lies. I have allowed satan to win my thoughts and begin to believe these lies in my heart. I tell myself there is no possible way I can make a difference where I am. I believe satan's truths about me and he begins to win.

I have found myself ignoring God and ignoring what He speaks into me. "Go and tell that person about Jesus. Go start that Bible study. Go reach out to that person who seems to be struggling. Message that girl you met and invite her to coffee, she needs it you know. Be friends with that person everyone else ignores. Give up your time to serve at your church. Write that blog post that might empower others. Have that hard conversation." All these things God has spoken into me and I simply ignore because I am afraid of what others will think of me. I cling to my worldly reputation and reject kingdom work in order to keep my life comfortable and centered around me.

I have built my kingdom up around me and demanded perfection from myself for as long as I can remember.

This past year was different, though. It was a wake up call. In October, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that solidified the fact that I will never be perfect. My disease is permanent and striving for perfection became pointless as it was unattainable. This was a huge hit to my life goal - to be perfect. I couldn't grasp the fact that my life was out of my control and there was nothing I could do to fix what was wrong with me. I started to hide from God in my actions. I wasn't praying anymore or going to church regularly. I snapped at people, how could they not see the identity crisis that was going on on the inside? I slowly found myself running further and further away from God because my reputation wasn't what I wanted it to be anymore. I couldn't play volleyball because I was sick. I didn't have the energy to get the grades I wanted. I was failing people and letting people down and it just kept spiraling.

But God waits for us. Eventually Moses came around and said okay God what do you have planned for me? Where are you sending me? How can I help Your mission? Moses went on to do amazing things because he accepted what God was calling him to do.

I feel like Moses lately. I feel like I am finally ready to give up the kingdom I have built for myself in this world in order to further His kingdom. I am ready to start saying yes to what God has planned for me.

The mission in my life isn't to be perfect.

We are called to the greatest mission there ever was.

Not a mission to make ourselves the most popular, most well-known.
Not a mission to be the seen as the coolest.
Not a mission to date the best guy or get the best grades.
Not a mission to win every game.

A mission to bring others to Jesus, day after day after day.
To never give up on people and to invest in them when they need it most.

To serve God in this mission how He calls us to. Coaches, teachers, accountants, doctors, writers, construction workers, youth pastors. We are all called to serve in a way only we know how. God has created us so uniquely with talents, skills that no other person has.

This mission doesn't come without sacrifice though. I am learning how to surrender my life, little by little to the plans God has for me. Each day this looks different. Some days it's sacrificing extra time on homework in order to really spend quality time with God in His word. It can be leaving a friend group for a while because you don't have the strength to not follow their influence that leads you away from Jesus. Or leaving a comfortable relationship because Christ isn't truly at the center of it. Sacrificing your reputation and looking a little weird in order to step out of your comfort zone and have hard conversations that no one wants to have. To sacrifice your life and everything you have for the sake of the kingdom and to make Him known in all we do.

"For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it."
Luke 9:24

Fighter

Hey fighter.

This is a tough one to write. This is one where the words have been articulating in my head all week but I haven't had the guts to really come to terms with them and write them out to see them on a screen. But you, you deserve to have words for you. You deserve the world that was taken so quickly from you. But you fought your way through life and live on through the inspiration you have given me.

I can remember vividly one instance, one holiday where I was probably inside my own head. Worried about my own life, not taking the time to really take in your presence and enjoy your giving spirit. I have always struggled under the notion that my life is always the most important thing going on and on this day I found myself uncomfortable with the hug goodbye I was going to receive. The amount of regret I feel in my heart now is immense and thinking about it breaks me down. You gave the best hugs and always made a point to give out a hug. I think I will always carry that with me from now on because it's something I will always remember from you.

Remember when I was in the hospital? The visit was long but so trivial looking back at it now. I thought it was the end of the world. My world came crashing down around me because my normal started to shift and what I believed my perfect little life should look like turned into this far-fetched dream that I couldn't attain anymore. But you showed up. You drove all the way to see me and show that you loved me. You presence meant the world to me and again in that moment I took you for granted. Oh what I would give to go back and thank you, say I love you Uncle Todd. People always have these regrets in their minds when someone is on the verge of leaving but oh how ungrateful my spirit has become. Oh how giving your spirit always was. You knew the importance of presence and showing up. Oh how I need to learn from you. I need to carry that part of you with me.

Memorial Day was the last time things were normal. I remember your concern over my birthday card in the mail and how you should've just brought the card to our family gathering instead of putting it in the mail and how I had to let you know once I got it. I remember all of us sitting around the fire, just talking on old memories. Some of my favorite times in life are these moments, all of us together reminiscing on the wild things we've done throughout the years. Time does that to you. It allows you to slow down and take everything in. In the midst of all the chaos, looking back on all the things we once thought mattered so much become so small and so trivial. And to think selfish me almost didn't come back for Memorial Day because I had other motives in mind. You made most of our family gatherings a reality. Your spirit was one of togetherness. You had an undeniable ability to bring those you loved together. I need to carry that with me.

Your story is inspiring. The devastation in your life, losing your dad so young. After feeling like I almost lost mine a couple years ago, my mind raced to thoughts of how I could survive without him. How my family could survive without the passion and love he puts into every day life. You experienced that firsthand, and so did you mom. But you guys fought. You fought it out together for the lives you lead now and what glorious examples of the victories we can win if we team up and do things together. Death will never be able to overcome us because we always inside us have the will to fight. And most importantly, you taught that to us. To your son and to Berta. That we cannot be shaken and we will not let this shatter us. We will stick together.

There's a line in one of my favorite songs that sings "death is at your doorstep, and it will steal your innocence but it will not steal your substance" and it's a line my mind keeps wandering back to when I allow it to navigate the depths on how I feel. This line creates imagery so powerful in my mind because of the strength you have shown in this. You lost everything in a matter of days but you still continue to smile for us. You choose to fight on. Your heart is in this. The hope inside of me reflects the hope inside of you. And when yours runs out, I will try to be the hope for you. There is always hope. Even now, when the end is so near. Let the hope of this world run out from underneath us. The hope your spirit will live on is enough to keep me going. You are a fighter.

You are a fighter.

And I think I will always carry that with me.

That's something I will always remember from you.

I'll be a fighter, too.

Love, Les Mis Style

“Let us say in passing, to be blind and to be loved, is in fact--on this earth where nothing is complete--one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a woman, a girl, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her, and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to someone necessary to you, to be able at all times to measure her affection by the degree of the presence that she gives you, and to say to yourself: She dedicates all her time to me, because I possess her whole love; to see the thought if not the face; to be sure of the fidelity of one being in a total eclipse of the world; to imagine the rustling of her dress as the rustling of wings; to hear her moving to and fro, going out, coming in, talking, singing, to think that you are the cause of those steps, those words, that song; to show your personal attraction at every moment; to feel even more powerful as your infirmity increases; to become in darkness, and by reason of darkness, the star around which this angel gravitates; few joys can equal that. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves; the conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be caressed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blindness where there is certainty.” - Victor Hugo

If you know me, you'd know that I get absolutely and completely obsessed with works of literature from year to year, and this year it happens to be the brilliant novel titled Les Miserables by the wonderful Victor Hugo. This book means the world to me (not to mention the movie adaption of the musical... flawless, entirely, I think) because of the whole idea of it. The running story line wraps itself around the idea of never being enough for God and one of my favorite topics - love. The passage above really speaks to me, honestly. In a world where love is so used and abused, I absolutely engross myself in older novels to figure out what they thought about love when they lived. Dissecting the literature, I ask myself, have the standards changed? Have our spirits wandered away from the original, precious idea of love? When you think about it all, we have completely. Love is so abused and taken for granted. It's such a magical thing, and it is so painful to see where some are in their relationships of "love" ... more so lust, no judgement, just typing what everyone thinks...

Anyway, the beginning sentence of this excerpt speaks wonders to me. To be blind and to be loved on this Earth where nothing is complete is one of the most strange and exquisite forms of happiness. This statement makes me smile. I think he means that to realize that the one you love is not complete, not perfect is very strange... You wonder, why do you love them? They are not perfect. How can this be so? Love is made to be perfect. Isn't it? He contradicts that. He alludes to the Bible in saying that love is blind. If you truly love, it does not matter to you the flaws of the other that you love. It is blind. And this feeling of blindness in love is one of the rarest forms of happiness there is in the world. My heart leaps at the idea of this kind of love, the ability to experience it. This sentence just feels like God is speaking to me. Love is blind, He says. And He is right.

The middle part of this except makes me think. How he talks about the love between the two lovers in the story just amazes me. The man realizes and knows that the woman needs him, loves him with everything she has, will never give up on him... Everything possible for a woman to feel when she is in love the man describes. How on Earth could he describe this? Because he notices... He notices the love his woman has for him and he surely does not take it for granted. He describes it as one of the greatest joys of his life. To have a woman love him with their whole mind, spirit, and heart in the most innocent yet passionate way she can and yet he doesn't take advantage of her. He doesn't hurt her. He enjoys every second of it. I absolutely love that. I love it. It amazes me and seeps into the depths of my heart. It gives me hope that love out there is like that, all you have to do is have faith in your God and know that He will provide. This book is loaded with biblical teachings. It is so amazing. Hugo intends the love he describes to be between a man and a woman, but the love described reminds me of the love to me from my God. 

Another quote that stands out to me in this excerpt tells me that love again is just accepting ourselves and our differences. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves, the conviction the blind have. Happiness in life comes from being loved for who we are. We are loved by God for who we are, who we aren't, and who we will be. We are blind to who we are. Only He knows. Doesn't that just make you happy? It feeds to my passion knowing that no matter who I am, no matter how many people spite me, no matter how many nights I feel low, He loves me. He loves me for who I am. All of it, down to every little detail. That's what I see in that line. 

The last quote I'd like to talk about is from the end of the excerpt. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love founded wholly in purity. There is no blindness where there is certainty. The very first sentence is breath-taking. Your light, your shining light coming from the spirit inside of you, is never lost when true love enters your mind. When you experience true love, you are never lost. You never change. You stay who you are in your entirety. Isn't that what God's love does for us? He loves us so much that we never have to change. We never feel like we need to change to be something we are not. We change to what He wants us to be. We change in the power of His love. A love found wholly in purity... His love is so pure. We can learn so much from the teachings. Pure love does not take away from the spirit. Pure loves fuels your passions, encourages your faith, comforts you just knowing you have this kind of love.

I just absolutely love love. How cliche, but honestly, it is one of the most powerful things a man can show a woman, and the absolute most powerful thing a woman can accept from her Father in Heaven. These words are powerful and I hope they touched you and inspired you like they inspire me :) 

Love, Kait.