I was raised in the church. If my mom were here, she would tell you the story of listening to me on the baby monitor when I was around a year old. She heard something that sounded like music coming from that little monitor, and realized that I was singing a song I’d learned in nursery at church. So I’ve been singing about Jesus since before I could speak.
And what a privilege that is. I was prayed for before I was born. I was spoken to about Jesus before I could speak. I was read scripture before I could understand it. I was told about forgiveness and love as soon as I was able to realize that I needed it. I had godly examples to follow from day one—from my parents to others in the church. And those things are a huge part of why I’m a Christian today. In some sense my relationship with Jesus has been rather boring—I literally can’t remember a day of my life that I didn’t know him—but my parents would be thrilled to hear that. And I know that many of you have the same hope for your children. So I wanted to point these things out as an encouragement to you. Mundane faithfulness is crucially important. My parents didn’t do anything magical. They encouraged…okay sometimes forced…me to read my bible. They ensured I focused on others—I remember one thing they did was that on the way to church on Sunday morning when I was a teenager, they would remind me that after church, I was expected to tell them something I learned about 3 different people’s lives while I was at church, and they couldn’t be the same people as last week. It was small, but it sent a clear message that I wasn’t at church just to glean something for myself—I was there to be part of a family, and to think about others besides myself. I tell you these examples to encourage you that your children see and notice things like that, and the love of Jesus really is permeating their heart because of them. They’re marinating in it, if you’re being faithful. And that is really beautiful.But my relationship with Jesus has grown and changed since singing about him in my crib, thankfully. As a teenager, I grew stronger in the faith. I went to public school, and so I had faced some opposition to my faith—kids made fun of me, I was excluded from certain things, etc. In the course of all of that, I developed a pretty strong sense of purpose. And I was sure that because I’d been faithful to God, he was going to bless me. Because that’s how it works, right? We do what God asks of us, and he gives us what we want. So, by the time I headed off to college, I had a pretty solid plan for my life. I was going to go to UVA, major in Economics, stay single, and then move to a far away country to do missions—specifically micro-loans to help the poor.
Well, within 1 day of setting foot on campus, a nice young man named Matt Kirkham, who was a friend of a friend, came to see how I was settling in. And within a few months we started dating. So much for staying single. Then I eventually took my 3rd economics class, where we started combining calculus with economics concepts. Didn’t go so well. Met with my advisor who said in no certain terms that he didn’t think economics was where I was gifted. So much for my major. By the time I graduated, Matt and I had gotten engaged, he’d gotten a job in Newport News, and we ended up getting married and moving back to within 30 minutes of where I grew up. So much for going to a foreign country.
And then, I became successful in my career. Like…really successful. Like…flying on private jets (once by myself), giving college lectures around the country about sustainability and our company’s story, giving away millions in charity, talking with reporters daily and seeing my name in the NYT, literally winning a national “Rising Stars Under 30” award in DC. I tripled my salary in 6 years of working—I was the youngest ever Director at the company. I could do it all. And then.
5 years ago, we became parents. My plan was to keep working, and to continue to rise. Because after all, I was doing it all for God, right? So he would bless me! Or at least if I decided to quit to raise my babies, I was going to do it in such a way that it made a statement to everyone I worked with—I would be an inspiration for them. Not quite how it worked out. The depression started when Jackson was around 4 months old. And it hit hard. Suddenly, I couldn’t sleep anymore. Ever. My eyes were just leaky faucets—unable to stop shedding tears. My thoughts turned dark—“I’m just a burden to everyone.” “They would be better off without me” “This is never going to change.” “No one cares about me.” Then, the panic attacks started. First just one or two, and then daily, and then multiple times a day. Finally, I found myself in the fetal position in my office during a panic attack at work, and I called my dad because I couldn’t get a hold of Matt. And he said—-"Kat, I think it’s time. It’s time to quit." I couldn’t even drive home that day—he came to pick me up and I sobbed as I skulked out the back door where no one would see me. I called my boss and told her I was taking the rest of my FMLA leave, and wasn’t coming back for a month—and then eventually decided I wasn’t coming back at all. I never even got to say goodbye to those I worked with, much less inspire them with my story. I just faded out into the background. But praise God for medication and my church family (and my actual family) because I was healthy again within 6 months. We were happy again. Life was good again. We decided to have another baby, and prayed constantly that it was a girl.
God granted me my undeserved and unearned wish of having a baby girl, two weeks before the start of the pandemic. I will never forget the joy I felt in the hospital, slipping on her bejeweled pink hat with a bow the size of her face. Literally every nurse that interacted with her used the word “perfect” to describe her. It was uncanny. She was this beautiful gift from God that I just didn’t deserve. She was perfect. Until she wasn’t. One day when she was around 7 months old we started to notice some strange behavior that over the course of a couple months morphed into seizures. They then came multiple times a day, and were horrendous to experience. It’s hard to describe what it feels like as a parent in that moment—the helplessness you feel as you watch the thing you love most in the universe suffer. And also just the spectacle of it all—I remember vividly trying to check out at Food Lion and she had one while sitting in the cart. I had to stop what I was doing to pick her up and hold her for a couple minutes until it stopped, and everyone around was just watching us, unsure what was happening or how to react. Doctors were puzzled by her—her brain scans are very abnormal, and unlike other cases of epilepsy they saw. We went to specialists, then even more specialists, then got our whole genome sequenced. For about 2 months, we were waiting for results to tell us whether or not she had a genetic syndrome that was fatal by age 5. She had a lot of the markers for it, and we were waiting to see if her DNA was consistent with it. I’ve never felt pain like I experienced during that time. I remember telling my pastor that I felt like Abraham—who prayed for years for his perfect little boy, and then was asked by God to give him up. And he responded by saying “But remember what happened? He didn’t end up having to give him up. God provided.” And then he showed up on my doorstep with a couple days later with a stuffed ram as a gift for Annabelle. We all know we have to trust God with our lives, with our plans, with those we love. But I’ve never had to do it in the way that I did during that time.
And, during that time while Annabelle was hospitalized, struggling, being tested, and still having daily seizures, I started to think I might have depression again. I was having mood swings, didn’t want to eat, was so tired. So I thought I should go see a doctor and maybe get back on antidepressants. But we knew the doctor’s first question would be to ask if there was any chance I was pregnant, so I wanted to rule that out before we went. Surprise! I saw the double lines and nearly fainted. You couldn’t have scripted worse timing. I was drowning, and now I’m being handed a baby? I had a hard time bonding with her while pregnant. Fear overwhelmed me. I kept being scared something would be wrong with her, that I would get depression again, that I wouldn’t be able to care for Annabelle well because I would have this baby to care for. And then, she was born—all 10 pounds of her, fast and furious with only 5 hours of labor and 1 push. And she was lovely from the start. I loved her immediately and fully. But only a couple hours after birth, she wasn’t breathing well. And then they ran some tests and thought something was wrong with her heart. So doctors came and told me in calm voices and tones that she would be transferred to another hospital without me. That Matt could accompany the ambulance behind her and call me when he got there. But I had already been through the possibility of losing a child, and I wasn’t about to lose one and not be there with her while she died. So, only 6 hours after giving birth, I got discharged, signed a paper saying they weren’t liable if Allie died in transit, gave her a kiss, got in the car and drove to Norfolk. We closed the door, and just sobbed. It felt like God was asking us, yet again, to trust him at a new level with this tiny little person I had just learned to love. She ended up being perfectly fine—it was just complications from her large size and fast birth. But that experience is one I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
So, needless to say, my life turned out nothing like I expected. Here I am, a stay at home mom with 3 healthy, and beautiful kids. God has just unraveled my plans over and over and over again, and has handed me different ones—his.
But not only has he unraveled my plans, he’s also unraveled my heart. It’s virtually impossible to put into words the changes that Jesus has brought me and the work that he’s doing inside this broken, messy life of mine. But the biggest one I’ve noticed is the realization, slowly and overtime, that it isn’t my life. That I’m not the center of the universe. That God has plans and is working on things so much bigger than myself and I’ve learned what it looks like to trust someone with that, at least partially.
So where does that leave me? What has it meant for me to live in light of this reality? I’ve always loved the part of the song called “Thy Mercy my God” where it says “Thy mercy is more than a match for my heart, which wonders to feel its own hardness depart.” I look back even over the short number of years I’ve lived and my heart is so much softer than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago. God promises to take our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh, and you know what? Fleshy hearts bleed more. They cry more. They bruise more. Not only over their own struggles, but over the struggles of others and the brokenness of the world. They're more like Jesus—-the man of sorrows, who entered the world and wept with us. So I’ve seen God working on me and I know he will continue to do that. I have an image of a sculptor working on a statue, and every time he chisels away a bit of the rock, it exposes a tiny piece of flesh underneath.
So, though that process, I’m slowly losing grip on my plans, on my heart, and on my life as he chisels away parts of me, but God is showing me that I can trust him with all of those. I know that God will continue to wreck my plans again and again, and he will continue to show me places where my heart is hard and it needs to be replaced. But that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? That we aren’t in control; He is.
