receive and repeat

Like any outpouring of creativity, writing has its ways of creeping into each fiber of my thinking.  It’s hilarious when ‘my Monday’ comes around how everything in front of me turns into a writing prompt.  A woman’s shoes in the airport spark questions of why on earth we put ourselves through such pain just to walk somewhere. Suddenly, parallels engulf my mind in ways that are as much profound as they are over-thought and well, a little nerdy. Nevertheless, when I finally sit down at my computer (this time my PC courtesy of Arizona FCA) and begin to pick and squeeze at each thought I’ve thought in the past two weeks, there’s always an inevitable, unavoidable topic that circles my mind like seagulls right before they go in for food. Whether I decide to write on the topic or auto-archive it in the back of my mind usually predicts the ease, flow and honesty of the words that follow.

All of that to say, I’ve been wanting to write on a certain thought for the short end of two months. And it can be wrapped up with a silky bow in one word… receive.

I’ve gotten to be a part of a sports camp in Flagstaff for the past seven years (minus the one year I was in St. Lucia on a mission’s trip. Judge all you want, we ‘suffered’ for the Lord on those sandy beaches.) Each summer, athletes and coaches at the top of their game give up a weekend, along with some fireworks, to retreat the heat and breathe in some pine air. I’ve had some form of leadership role at each camp I’ve attended, so if I wasn’t scurrying around as a huddle leader, chasing my boy-crazy, teenage girl campers, I was making sure the new huddle leaders were caffeinated and encouraged enough to keep up with their own boy-crazy teenage campers.   Quite often, those same campers have a first-time interaction with the perfect, loving God of the universe. Soon, they're gladly trading in their boy-crazy for grace-crazy. It’s that intangible, yet recognizable transformation that happens within the soul of a young person that keeps me coming back for more. That, and the wicked cafeteria food.

This past year as I stood in the back of the large room where we have our evening program, I witnessed several strong, grown, athletic boys walking up to receive Christ for the first time. I was captivated by the reckless power and encapsulated freedom receiving allows.  That’s when it hit me. The love I’m able to give out, the love God is able to spill out through me, depends utterly and exclusively on the love I’m willing to receive.  God was moving in hearts, adopting sons and daughters, and shifting all of eternity before my very eyes, and this time, I decided to stop watching and start participating. He had invited me to do so countless times before, but I had politely declined because I needed to be responsible, or I was somehow ‘good’ on the amount of grace and love I had already gotten that day. Um… what? How hardened my heart has become towards grace because I received my ‘get out of jail free card’ 15 years ago, and how tragic to think that the author of salvation wrote this story only to be read or received once.

 Today, I am certain that in order to fully experience and know God I don’t just want to, but NEED to receive his son in an irresponsible, off-the-to-do-list, brought-to-tears kind of way. Every day. Every way. Every single avenue or outlet possible.  I will always have a first time I received Christ, but how radically different would my life look if the last time I received his gift was two days ago? Two hours ago? Two minutes ago? Imagine the available love, the freeing grace, the restored hope and the unshaken faith I would not only live in, but gleefully hand out along the way.

So next time you see, hear, or taste something so good it makes you close your eyes to make it last a little longer, view that moment as an open invitation to receive God’s outpouring love. Every good and pleasant thing is from him, and further, an invite to experience the miracle of grace all over again. What invaluable instruments we could be if we had the courage to truly rest in it. Relish in it. Re-open it. Receive it. And repeat it.

to-do lists

I am about to write about something that I often cannot do.  And while we all know people who certainly live this out a little better than others, I think it is safe to say we all fall short most of the time.  It’s about loving people.  And not merely loving them because we feel like we have to, but really, wholeheartedly loving people. 

I call it loving well. 

And by well, I mean unconditionally, selflessly, purely, joyfully, all the time.

Being showered, covered, filled with love the past few weeks has made me think deeply about loving well.  Mostly, I am seeing the ways I don’t do it and thinking about how much I want it to be one of the things that defines my life, what I want to be known for as much as anything else I accomplish.  Nothing is more life-giving than loving someone, and it is worth doing with intention and genuineness.  As I sit here in a cozy Starbucks in Banff, Canada (because where else would I write?) I am thinking about where I am missing the mark, and I know there are a handful of things I can do to love better.  This list is certainly not all-inclusive, and those of you who know me well could probably—no, definitely— add to it.  But I am blessed with gracious friends and family who love me even though they have all the information necessary to not.  Thank you for that.  For now, here is my “Love well to-do list”:

Listen before I speak.  As much as I may think I understand a situation, I probably don’t.  Human beings are layers and layers of complexity and emotion, and often times I give myself permission to label someone and the situation they are in without their consent.  I use my education, my experience, or worse, my so-called “spiritual-ness” to justify my opinion, and I am finding that this is more damaging than it is helpful.  More often than not, people do not need a diagnosis, they need to be heard, to be reminded that God is good, to be sincerely prayed for, to be cared about.  I think that most of the time, people don’t even want my words as much as they want my ears, but my desire to sound like I have a solution usually trumps their desire to be understood.  Lord, give me a heart that listens before you give me a mouth that speaks. 

Read Galatians 6:14 every day.  As for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Because of the cross, my interest in this world has been crucified, and the world’s interest in me also has died.  The problem is that I want things to boast about… I actually want you to tell me that you like how Kristin and I write and that my hair looked nice and that I am smart and pretty good at my job and will make a good mom some day.  As much as I wish I wasn’t, I am interested in those things.  But I am finding that they bring me more bondage than they do freedom, and I cannot love you well when I am depending on you to tell me good things about myself.  Don’t get me wrong, complimenting, praising and pointing out beautiful things about each other are good, necessary things, and we must keep encouraging in order to love well.  But I know that your applause won’t sustain my joy for very long, and as soon as it stops I am out of love to give you.  My source of joy has to be the cross, every day, all the time, in any circumstance, because the cross is really the only perfect example of loving well.

Celebrate everything.  Sometimes I am reluctant to join others in their joy.  Why?  The options are pride, judgment or jealousy, and all of those are very ugly qualities in someone.  When great things happen to others, I want to be the first to celebrate with them.  And not just by clicking “like” on facebook, but with a phone call that says with sincerity “I am so happy for you!”  There have been times when I was so blinded by my own myopic thoughts that I have missed a chance to love someone well.  At certain times in my life, whether is has been an outfit, a job, an engagement, a house, or a baby…  if I wanted it and someone else got it, I did not truly celebrate with them.  I may have done something on the surface, but my heart was more envious than happy.  There is no love in pity parties, but there is more love than we know what to do with in celebrations.  Whether it is a big thing or a small thing, I want to celebrate all that is good with no thought of myself.  I want to love others by adding my joy to theirs. 

Write down my prayers for others.  In my opinion, “I’m praying for you” is one of the most over-said and under-done phrases in the world.  And it’s because it is such a powerful phrase that is way too easy to say.  When I tell someone I am praying for them, there is a part of me that feels like my work is done.  “There, I did the Christ-like thing to do and threw out the prayer card, now… on to my life’s concerns.”  But then I have moments when I remember that life is much too hard for trite offerings to pray.  If I am not actually going to stop and pray, I should be ashamed of myself for even saying it.  For me, the discipline of praying for others comes in my journal, in actually putting words to paper and offering those thoughts to the One who knew them before I did.  Praying for others reminds me that at any given moment when I feel my life is tougher than anyone understands, a hundred hard things are happening to people I love, and they need me to not say I will pray, but just pray.  They will pray for me when I need it, too.  Prayer, real prayer, is loving someone well.   

Send real mail.  This one is simple, and who honestly does not like getting real mail?  There is something about hand written notes that makes us feel a little extra cared for, because whoever wrote it took more than two minutes, thought it was important enough to pay 44 cents for a stamp, and loved me enough to want me to have that moment of happiness when I grabbed her letter from the pile.  I want to do the best job I can of reminding people that I think they are pretty great, and every so often I want it to be a little more than a text.  I want to give others something to put in their drawer and pull out at the right moment, when they need a reminder that they are loved.  I have kept almost every letter ever written to me since third grade, because the words in them still make my heart happy.  Sometimes loving well is the simplest gesture with the biggest impact. 

I am an unbelievably blessed girl, well beyond what my life deserves.  I am more thankful for a God who is merciful and friends with exclusive memories than I can say.  But it is one of the most genuine desires of my heart to love others better than I do.  I have freely been given love, and I want to give it just as freely.  I’ll start with my list, but I can only hope over a lifetime it’s not a list but Christ in me doing all the loving.  

my best friend's wedding

This past weekend my best friend got married. There’s something magical, delightful and gleefully fulfilling about getting to witness a union so shaped and molded by God’s hands that it could be labeled a masterpiece before ‘I do’s’ are even spoken.  Maybe it was the sunflowers bursting out of our bouquets, the gentle breeze that danced Katie’s veil in rhythmic motion, or the giddy, school-kid love of two people desperate to share life together. Whatever ‘it’ was, it was good. It was a little slice of heaven wrapped in each embrace and every banana cupcake. It was a taste of eternal in toasted, sparkling champagne. It was a glimpse of everlasting as guests of every age danced and laughed well into the night. We celebrated love and believed deeply in its force and freedom because of the bride and groom in front of us.

Katie glowed with an effortless kind of ease. She smiled bigger than I had ever seen her smile before and cherished her day in pure beauty and grace. Although there were countless memories written in permanent marker in my mind, there were those special, extraordinary moments that, if captured on film, would launch Kodak’s marketing department into ‘kodak moment’ advertising nirvana well into the next decade.  Still, as I sorted through the snapshots of Katie walking with her dad, Alex dancing with Katie’s four-foot-nine little Nanni, Emily tearing (as in cry) up during our speech, and my sister tearing (as in bust a move) up the dance floor, there was one incredibly special moment that I will hold captive as I look back on this weekend for the rest of my life.

If you know Katie Blackburn at all, chances are you’ve gotten Starbucks with her. That’s what she does, and what other people do with Katie. So the fact that I got to go with my best friend to Starbucks the morning of her wedding may not seem like such a big deal. But, I have to thank our venti soy chai latte and our grande iced coffee with sugar-free vanilla and room for being the means to the conversation that got to take place that morning. We sat in the Pleasanton Starbucks between one young man ferociously typing on his computer (perhaps a Berkley law student) and another older gentleman enjoying his morning paper as much as his morning scone. Two girls in their twenties, giddy with anticipation of what the day would bring, sat and chatted for a bit. We talked through the day, finalized some last-minute planning, and ended each new thought with… “Wow…I can’t believe it’s here.”

 Katie would well up with a few tears and then explain herself and her tears in a way that deemed them silly or inappropriate.  For the record, the only thing silly when it comes to crying in front of Kristin Stockfisch is an explanation of tears. If one only knew the water works produced by this 6 ft blonde, no future friend (or complete stranger for that matter) would ever feel the need to explain his/her flooded emotion. So on her wedding day, I got to cry a little with my friend. Not because she was scared, anxious, or unprepared but because she was grateful. Katie sat in her pj’s with her hair up and her flip flops on and cried because in God’s rich grace and renewing mercy she sat overwhelmed by his love. She shook her head looked off in the distance and just couldn’t feel like she deserved the love she felt from her family, her friends, and ultimately her groom-to-be.

There are a lot of things I love about my friend. But on August 13^th I got to look her in the eye and tell her how much I love her humility. If only I could approach every day with the kind of undeserving reverence that Katie had that morning, I might finally understand what this grace thing is all about. It’s only in the moments when we feel significantly low in the face of a perfect God that he pours out his undying love on us in a way that takes us higher than any substitute this world might offer. Katie soaked in a heavenly dose of God’s grace that day and it humbled my heart to get to with her.

So Katie, thanks for making the real thing the real thing on a day that is supposed to be centered around ‘you.’ Thanks for crying because of how undeservedly grateful you felt, and thanks for reminding me that the shadow of the cross is the only place where we can be equally moved and rested in the presence of saving grace.

To your forever love as Mrs. Blackburn,

cheers.

a love(ly) story

A funny thing has been happening to my heart the past few weeks, and by funny I mean pretty amazing.  I still haven’t found the perfect words to describe it, but it is some combination of

 joyful, overwhelming, excited, humbled, grateful
(*if you happen to have a word for this, do share)

This season of my life has been a lot of different things.  It has been full: I finished a master’s degree and went to South America alone and said goodbye to the east coast and hello to the northwest and found a big girl job and got engaged.  It has been good: a little boy named Trey was born and is turning in to the cutest little guy on the planet and has an “I can make auntie Katie’s heart melt” smile that never fails and my blessing of niece of Bayley came into the world at the most perfectly unexpected time and I celebrated with some of my oldest friends as they married their soul mates.  It has been painful: I have let down people I love and jumped to the wrong conclusions and been ashamed of my attitude and had my heart broken.

And here I am, the week before I get to marry my best friend, and I am thinking about all the fullness, the goodness, and the painfulness, and again I feel that emotion that I can’t wrap up with my words and name with any accuracy.  And I get uncomfortable when my words aren’t sufficient, because I love words, and I feel more in control when they are enough. 

I seem to always want to write my own life stories.  I like dictating who the characters are and what the endings will be.  I like knowing what’s around the corner in suspenseful moments, and if I could place all the right people in all the right places at all the right times I absolutely would.  The setting would always be beautiful, and even though I might throw in some unpredictability here and there just to keep it interesting, I would make sure nothing pushed me too far out of my comfort zone.  But that is not how this all works.  And if I am honest, I don’t fully know how to let go of that- how to say I trust in Someone bigger and yet still feel like I want control.

Right now, I am living a love story.  It has been all those things that this season of life has been: full, good, and sometimes painful.  Saying that I am imperfect might be the understatement of the millennium.  And while at my very best I may have some redeeming qualities, at my worst I am opinionated, insecure and therefore judgmental of others, anxiety-ridden, and full of false pride.  And God very literally gave me a better half.  I promise you Alex would disagree.  As he reads this he will probably think “No way.  I got the better end of the deal here.  I did this and this and this, and I am that and that and that.  This is backwards, Katie.” But I know Alex, and I won the lottery with him.  He has been honest when it was the hardest thing in the world to be.  He was vulnerable when many other men would have run.  And he loves me so well.  It will be the greatest honor of my life to put on a white dress, come around the corner arm in arm with other man in my life- mi Padre- and walk into a lifetime covenant with God and Alex. 

I would love to know exactly what the rest of our love story will bring us.  It would be amazing to know when we will have kids and if they will be healthy and strong and grow up to love Jesus.  It would also be great if we could predict the financially harder times to come so that we can prepare better.  And if we could add some foresight into jobs, homes, moving, serving, extended family, and all of that other stuff that would be just splendid, too.  But again, that is not how this all works. 

My security in not knowing what is coming over the next horizon is this: We are all living a love story.  It’s the story of a man who lived and died on this earth about 2000 years ago, but has never not been there.  It’s the story of infidelity and betrayal from the bride, and forgiveness and grace from the one wronged.  It’s the story of persecution and mocking, then justice and redemption.  And it is the only story we already know the ending to even though we haven’t seen it yet.  This story is full and good and painful, but it’s a love(ly) story.  Putting my faith in the ending while living in the craziness that is today, well, it is the hardest thing to do.  But the only way to embrace my own little love story is in light of the big love story—the one I am not the main character in and that is not even written for my sake.

If I would have been writing my story the whole time, I probably would have left out a lot of things that happened—skipped the painful chapters completely.  But I know now I would have missed it, that thing God has been trying to teach me since the day he knit me together: that my story, even my little love story, is all for his glory.  He is the only writer who can turn ashes into beauty, pain into healing, death into life.  When I believe that, I don’t even want the pen anymore, because I know I can’t even begin to fathom what He is writing- but it definitely is a joyful, overwhelming, excited, humbled, grateful feeling knowing that He is writing me into His love(ly) story.


A wedding ring is the sign of a covenant, a never ending, continuous promise.  And it is a beautiful thing, that covenant, a forever thing.  But we have a more beautiful symbol for an even more amazing covenant, and diamonds and platinum can't compare to it.  It's dirty and blood-stained and made of wood, and it was carried for miles on the back of a beautiful man.  Jesus gave us more than a ring to promise us forever, he gave us his life.  His covenant is part of his love story with us, and it's how we live daily with all that is full, good, and painful.  If his story can overcome anything, even death, our little stories can, too.  


Alex, I love you with all the love I have today.  But my prayer is that tomorrow, in light of the cross and the beautiful covenant Jesus left us, I would learn to love you even more.  Your Bride, Katie.  

____________________

Oh what love, no greater love...

Grace, how can it be?

That in my sin,

Yes, even then

He shed his blood for me...

shadow mission

One of my favorite people in the world often talks in front of people. He has stories that are classically memorable and others that are ridiculously overused. Nevertheless, the point always comes across, the plane always lands, and often the crowd is left thinking a little bit deeper, a little more profoundly once the talk has concluded. One such story that slips into the category of classically memorable has to do with purpose. With great insight and ponder, he ventures the idea that everything in the room has a purpose. The light makes it possible for us to see, the chair is made sturdy to hold our weight so we can sit down, the door allows us to come inside the room, the door knob… well, you get it. He talks of how everything in the room knows its purpose, except us. Humans were built with such capacity, such complexity and such brilliance and yet have no answer when pressed with, ‘what’s your purpose?’

I am not the first to write of purpose. Nor the first to write of a life mission. But this is the first time that I’ve written of my own mission with a mark of unmistakable assurance. I’ve come to realize in the last few weeks with blazing clarity that the reason I feel so disconnected and terribly unused as of late is not just because I’ve moved to a new place. It’s because I’ve stepped away temporarily from my sweet spot. My purpose. My life mission. If you’re a follower of Christ and yearn to serve him wholeheartedly you should know your mission (spoiler alert- it’s at the end of Matthew.) But in the grandness of God and his incomprehensible creativity, he’s made every single human a little bit differently. So even though it’s my mission to spread the gospel, what does that look like in Kristin’s life specifically? How am I wired, molded and created to bring the most glory to the one who breathed life into me?

  I believe it is my purpose to find my own worth only in the presence of my creator, and bring others to know the value, grace, and perfect love freely available in exchange for a life carved by relentless inadequacy. 

Here’s the sticky thing about a life this side of heaven though. For every flawless purpose God has divinely woven in us, there is an equal pull from the conflicting side that I’ve heard to be called a shadow mission. Dangerously lurking in opposition, the enemy knows how we’re wired, molded and created enough to present us with a different choice on how to live. Often, he places it on a shiny platter and dresses it up to look an awful lot like our divine mission. In my own life, I’ve come to find that evil does it’s best work in me when I’m looking for my own worth in the temporary things and opinions of this world, and when I’m somehow prevented to encourage others to move towards an unshaken faith in Christ.

Needless to say, in the past couple weeks there have been several days when my shadow mission out-lived and out-worked my divine one. And candidly… those days suck. They’re lifeless, confusing, lazy and tiring. So if those words have ever been synonyms of your own life, seek the one truth, the one Father, the one savior that can transform years of insecurity, pain, and confusion into a steady, focused mission of peace and ultimate fulfillment.

Seek your mission, pray with renewed passion to do his work, and arm yourself with the light of Christ because it’s only in his marvelous light that those lurking shadows cannot exist.