by Jen Hatmaker
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.1
— GEORGE SAND
CHAPTER 8
NO STRINGS ATTACHED
So I was the exact eighties Baptist youth group girl you think I was. If you didn’t grow up in Christian subculture back then, all I can say is that we teens graduated from True Love Waits, jammed to Petra (“a wholesome alternative to Def Leppard!”), aggressively highlighted our Life Application Bibles to impress our seatmates at church, and wore T-shirts that said: “If Bo don’t know Jesus, then Bo don’t know Diddley,” because appropriating current pop culture for Jesus Jukes seemed like an effective evangelical strategy, God bless and keep us.
I was oh so earnest. I carried my Bible to class after our youth camp pastor challenged us to, making the side-eye comment that “most of you will give up by October.” Well, listen, buddy, you don’t throw down the devotion gauntlet in a room full of teen Pharisees, then walk away casually. I’ll see your October and raise you a fifteen-pound study Bible displayed on my desk corner in May. How did I have any friends?
As a firm member of the purity and holiness culture, I harbored so much judgment toward my peers. I looked down my nose at all their shenanigans and was prepared at any time, like 1 Peter 3:15 instructed, as if I was defending my senior thesis, to “give an answer for this hope I professed” (while conveniently overlooking the next sentence: “But do this with gentleness and respect”). I didn’t know about that gentleness thing, but I did indeed have answers. Come at me, bro.
Looking back, trying to identify the motivation for my spiritual posture is tricky. What exactly compels a sixteen-year-old to isolate her classmates and peddle spiritual shame? Myriad cultural factors affected my generation of youth groupers, but it isn’t the whole truth to simply cast blame on our leaders and shrug off the weird stuff we all bought into. Nor is the chief culprit my type A personality with a heavy moral compass, although those qualities contributed.
I think I was afraid.
I was scared, first and foremost, of God. What a terrifying God I crafted back then: punitive, picky, arbitrary, angry. Holiness culture meant you were always one careless French kiss away from divine disapproval, because, like Jesus said, why buy the cow when you’re giving the milk away under the bleachers? I spent all my spiritual energy trying to stay on God’s Good Side, which I managed around twenty-three minutes a day. It was exhausting and scary and impossible. I was petrified of God. I don’t remember what I thought of Jesus. Jesus was the Side Guy.
I was also scared to love people. What if they were wrong? Wrong about what, you ask? Oh, just anything. Wrong living, wrong ideas, wrong faith, wrong crowd. If I loved someone “wrong,” then I was complicit. I was lending approval to wrongness, and that would banish me from God’s Good Side, obviously. Plus, I couldn’t bear the disapproval of my fellow youth group pals. Any wrongness infiltrating the camp was forbidden. As warned, it starts with one wrong friend, and the next thing you know, you are a backslidden Christian at a raucous teen beer party with no opportunity to rededicate your life until next summer’s youth camp.
I thought God’s plan for human beings essentially involved stringent rules to help us be really good (secured by guilt—His way of keeping order), suffering and sacrifice to keep us humble, clear moral boundaries to protect our “set apartness,” and a life of restraint until we could mercifully die and go to heaven. I assumed our main responsibility to other people was to point out their errors so they could repent and get with the plan.
Imagine my shock when I discovered God’s actual plan.
As it turns out, it’s a good plan (good meaning actually good here): send Jesus to change all the rules and set people free in every way (apparently Jesus was more than just the Side Guy!). By word and deed, example and instruction, Jesus would teach His followers to love the outcast and the poor, to embrace their communities and each other. He would give them distinct marching orders—generosity, humility, grace, inclusion, courage—and tell them it all boils down to two things: loving God and people. (He’d make this part super clear by saying it to religious leaders!) The plan had Jesus go on and on about what it means to be blessed in this life, making sure He included the upside-down stuff: meekness, mourning, community, simplicity, kindness. He gave honor to a bunch of folks in the right head space, like kids and widows and outsiders. He slayed at parties and dinners. Oh! And Jesus forgave His enemies while He was hanging on the cross, just to be clear about how forgiveness worked pragmatically.
God’s plan was smart, because obviously this sort of life would change people so dramatically and permanently, they would choose to live it out in their neighborhoods and cities and countries all around the world. They wouldn’t be able to help it. It’s too good, this good news. It would deliver them from their prisons and fix their souls and mend the fragile places and give them a new song. This hurting, lonely world would be drawn to these people and their Savior who gave them these ideas, because who wouldn’t be? Who isn’t looking for grace and belonging? Everyone wants to be loved and God loves everyone, so this was the very definition of a win-win.
Such a good plan, this gospel.
The redeemed would tell this love story with their lives because they’ve been told over and over that love is supreme, the most excellent way, the language of their tribe, the way of their God. They’ll know for sure to default to love. At least that part will remain clear through seismic changes across centuries and cultures.
This beautiful way to live seems obvious to me now, but for a couple of decades, fear kept me locked into the tidier terrain of religion and distanced from the wide-open spaces of grace. When I recall the story of God I told with my life—one of behavior and shame and elitism—I can only beg Jesus to redeem any confusion I created, stealing hope and belonging right out of the hands of people who needed it. I missed it, and consequently I caused others to miss it because no one wanted the story I was selling. I didn’t even want it.
If understood, believed, and lived out, God’s plan would naturally place Christians at the epicenter of their communities, like hope magnets, like soft places to fall, like living sanctuaries. We’d be coveted neighbors and trusted advocates, friends to all and enemies of none. Our reputation would precede us, and we would be such a joy to the world.
And often we deeply are. Without question, some of the bravest folks I know doing the hardest work in the darkest places with the loneliest people do so in the name of Jesus. If all Christian organizations and churches and individuals pulled up anchor, the ripple effect would reverberate to the ends of the earth. Millions of the marginalized would lose their advocates, victims would lose their defenders, hurting neighbors would lose their friends. An enormous amount of hope would vanish.
In many cases, our reputation precedes us and it is good.
But sometimes it’s not.
People are famously tone deaf regarding their own clans, so a good temperature check is to ask folks outside the faith community what they see. We should expect the same benchmarks Paul gave the early church: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (I sang it in my head. Cannot be helped. Thanks, Vacation Bible School circa 1981.) This observation would indicate the plan is in solid motion and a bunch of stuff is going right.
But when a watching world concludes the opposite, fundamentally, deeply at faith’s core, something has gone dreadfully off the rails. For a minute, let’s push issues and controversy and legislation and talking points aside. What does it mean when our communities construe Christians as mean, judgmental, hypocritical, and exclusive? What does it reveal? Something along the chain of command has broken down terribly. God did not order the Code Red, so we should not have this much blood on our hands. (“God, were you clear about the love thing?” “Crystal.”)
Is it because Christ-foll
owers have famously preferred the fruits of the mind over the fruits of the Spirit? Do we cling too tightly to dogma and too loosely to love? When Being Right is our highest aim, our most intimate bedfellows are academics, apologetics, and rigorous defense, and we have to use the tools of the world to secure our rank. Within this paradigm, it is easy to believe God’s pleasure in us hinges on our aggressive defense of the kingdom, when, in fact, He told us repeatedly our chief identifier is how we love. (God managed to stay on His throne all these millennia, so I suspect He will not fall out of the sky on our watch.)
Or does this perception of Christians persist because we so greatly struggle to receive our own grace that we are unable to disperse it? It is difficult for human beings to accept unearned mercy. It flies in the face of our merit-based system. We want to earn our goodwill; therefore, we want others to earn theirs. But grace is an inside job first. God’s love compels us to do likewise, but it must first win a hearing in our own souls if it has any chance at an outward expression. Loved people love people. Forgiven people forgive people. Adored people adore people. Freed people free people. But when we are still locked in our own prisons, it is impossible to crave the liberation of others. Misery prefers company.
Or maybe it is because we sincerely, honestly, deeply want to please God, and this world confuses and scares us because it is so far away from the promised land. So in our worry and devotion, we lash out, hoping to reclaim what has been lost. We crave spiritual territory in dark places, but that desire presents as narrowness and anger and fear. I identify with this instinct so deeply. It is a complicated dance, and we easily confuse our place in the narrative. Desperately wanting God’s kingdom to come, we lead with the law, like a sixteen-year-old girl who thought a Bible on a desk corner would represent the story of God more than the warm, safe embrace of human connection.
But the law was never sufficient to make all things new. That is precisely why Jesus came. The law fell short for personal piety, societal restoration, and rightness with God. It didn’t build bridges toward salvation or set people free. It only made folks feel small and inept, outsiders to an ideology that proved impossible. The law was a heavy yoke upon tired necks, and people buckled under its weight.
Which is why the law of love introduced by Jesus is the story to tell.
It is the story that saves and heals, that invites and refuses to condemn. Christian, it is the right way and the best way. Jesus’s brother James told us: “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.” We can stand rightly before God when love leads and compels us. We need not fear that He will say, “You loved too greatly, too liberally, too generously, too shockingly.” The entire story of God reveals a vast, encompassing campaign to love humanity all the way home. It is the clearest picture of Jesus, who we should desire in every heart. People may hate us because of Jesus, but they should never hate Jesus because of us. The way we treat others should lead them to only one conclusion: “If this is how Jesus loves, then I’m in.”
When in doubt, ask yourself: What would love feel like here, to this person? And for the sake of clarity, let’s assume we are not dealing with violent or harmful behavior where someone is endangering herself or others. That is a different category of communication, so don’t let a straw man keep you from engaging in this discussion. Which is: What does love look like in the ordinary connection between two human people? Usually it means prioritizing someone’s dignity, belovedness, and experience over being right or pointing out errors. We may even discover we weren’t so right after all, or at any rate, we didn’t fully understand.
I’ve learned this deeply from friends and leaders in the black community. Previously unaware of systemic injustice, my implicit bias, and my knee-jerk reaction to black pain or outrage, I’ve since discovered that “Yeah, but . . .” or “Well, I’m not . . .” or “Okay, but what about . . .” or “No, it didn’t . . .” is the opposite of love. Love means saying to someone else’s story or pain or anger or experience: “I’m listening. Tell me more.” Love refuses to deny or dismantle another’s perspective simply because I don’t share it. At its core, love means caring more about that person’s soul than anything else. The New Testament coined it with a lovely phrase: preferring others. It’s a super simple approach that would change the whole world.
My girlfriend Jessica and I were talking about the lost art of dialogue this week: the free flow of meaning between two or more people. When we are skilled at dialogue, we create safe spaces for everyone to add their own meanings to a shared pool of understanding, and no matter how much we believe differently, our perspective only occupies a bit of the pool. This may feel threatening at first, especially if the dialogue is controversial or shared between people with different beliefs. But even if we disagree, perhaps even strongly, it is still possible to hold a civil dialogue where ideas find their way out into the open.
Why is this so hard? Staying reasonable and measured and respectful in the midst of charged conversations is a lost art. The way of our generation is outrage, offense, and polarization—our new common language. The Internet has made us casually offensive (because the repercussions are mitigated) and quicker to speak. But dialogue is an activity of curiosity, cooperation, discovery, and learning rather than persuasion, competition, fear, and conflict. This is love, and it is increasingly rare.
Some useful statements to pocket to create safe spaces for discussion:
Tell me more about that.
Tell me how your thoughts progressed in this.
I appreciate your experience with this. I’m listening.
I hear what you are saying.
I would love to learn from you.
I care about how you feel and your perspective here.
I understand that. I identify with that.
What do you think of __________?
I hadn’t thought of it in that way. Thank you for that angle.
Let me think about that a bit before I respond. Thanks for your transparency.
We listen sincerely; we don’t just reload while someone else’s mouth is moving. Dialogue is easily spooked, so you must be vigilant against fear, dismissal, manipulation, and apathy—true enemies of safe dialogue. You’ll feel it at first, deep down, the urge to rebut, rebuke, refute. It will be a cold rock in your gut, tempting you to correct or disagree, or to be offended and center yourself in that person’s story. But that instinct can be overcome, and the results of someone feeling heard and respected are immediate and palpable. It takes a fairly high level of humility, empathy, and courage to keep a space open and healthy. It is a developed skill that takes practice.
To me, that is what love looks and feels like. The Christian cliché “love the sinner, hate the sin” is problematic because it is always long on judgment and short on love. People sense that deeply; they understand when a relationship is fundamentally unsafe, precariously balanced on a scale of disapproval. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, a fork in the road will come, and the rejection will be painful beyond measure. I am in a couple of relationships exactly like that, except I am the one on the ropes. I hold back from investing because I know the inevitable end game. I am steeling myself against desertion. As kind and polite as these relationships are now, they feel very different from my friendships that are forever, regardless, despite anything, permanent. I don’t know how to explain it, but my soul knows the difference.
It is not my responsibility to change other people, nor them me. It just isn’t. It never was. Remember, the plan involves a heavy, obscene amount of love on my part, but I can take the task of “fixing someone” entirely off the table, permanently. I’m free to love him or her without stipulation, which creates a much wider, safer space to actually let God do what God does, which is redeem all of our lives into glory.
You have this permission, dear one. Can you hear it? Snip, snip, snip. The sound of the strings attached to love clipped right off. No strings
. You can love truly, without conditions, without agenda, without a fork in the road, without disapproval, without fear, without obligation. You can love someone with a different ideology, different religious conviction, different sexual identity, ideas, background, ethnicity, opinions, different anything. You can love someone society condemns. You can love someone the church condemns. You have no other responsibility than to represent Jesus well, which should leave that person feeling absurdly loved, welcomed, cherished. There is no other end game. You are not anyone’s savior; you are a sister.
Love is a genuine solution. It breaks down barriers and repairs relationships. It invites in the lonely and defeats shame. It provides the lighted path to forgiveness, which sets everyone free. Love makes us brave, pulls up seats to the table, defuses bigotry, and attacks injustice. It is our most powerful spiritual tool. Do not underestimate it as the solution to almost everything that is broken.
We have only a few days on earth in the scope of history. We get one shot at this, one chance to live in a way that brings true honor to God, the great Lover of people. After Jesus’s sacrifice, we became the cornerstone of His plan to embody good news as living demonstrations of His character. It is a humbling task with eternal consequences, and may it be said of our generation that we loved well. Just like we were taught. Just like we received.
Makeup can only make you look pretty on the outside, but it doesn’t help if you are ugly on the inside. Unless you eat that makeup.1
— AUDREY HEPBURN
CHAPTER 9
MY SOUL MATE NETFLIX