by Jen Hatmaker
Would you rather be rich or famous?
The answers were absolutely hilarious, and along with half of SC, I said: “Famous.” I know. Gross. In my defense, my reasoning was that our life was happy as is, and money wasn’t that motivating, so I defaulted to fame, which seemed harmless, intangible, almost like a fake paradigm with no real effect. I guess I pick famous! Tra la la.
Girls, forget that noise. I’ve since had a small taste of that, and it is the oddest, most bizarre alternate universe ever. Being low-grade Christian famous is straight-up crazy. I only occupy a very minor corner of this zip code, enough to know what I’m talking about but not enough to make me a weirdo. I am regularly confused by my life. I do things I never planned on a hot day in my imagination: write books people read, speak on stages, talk on the radio, show up on TV sometimes. Are you kidding me with this? I wanted to be Janet Jackson or, if not that, a librarian. I taught fourth grade and married a youth pastor. This was not my life plan.
I wrote my first book in 2004. It was published in 2006 with two others I fast-tracked. I wrote three more in three years, and exactly no one read any of them or knew anything about me for the next five years. I basically worked for free, and I’m pretty sure I made negative money. I spoke at every sort of retreat, once in a living room with five women, one of whom slept through my entire “talk.” At one small church, I was introduced as “Jen Hatfield,” and no one corrected her because they had zero idea what my name was either. In fact, until a few years ago, when you googled my name, the same question popped up every time: Did you mean Jean Hatmaker?
I cannot quit laughing about Jean. I miss that girl.
Trust me: don’t waste your time overvaluing Christian famous people. It is so easy to cast public figures as prototypes of discipleship or pristine examples of faithfulness, but all that admiration is totally misplaced. I mean this sincerely: only Jesus is worth your full devotion. He alone will never let you down and will always lead you correctly. The rest of us? Oh my word. We will fail you, disappoint you, and even shock you, because we are the exact same brand of human as anyone else. I am short-tempered, lazy, self-preserving, and indulgent. I do not share all your theology and interpretations, and if you look to me as your spiritual plumb line, you will be gravely disappointed, if not now, someday. Believe me. You will want to kick kittens. Sometimes my mess outpaces my moxie, and no one has the good sense to deactivate my social media accounts so I will not become an actual threat to the kingdom of God.
Idolizing human beings just isn’t the way Jesus built His community to thrive. He decentralized, empowering ordinary people to be carriers of the good news. He commissioned the kingdom to mamas and daddies and fishermen and widows and fresh new believers and former terrorists. Jesus had nothing but harsh words for the Fancy Leader paradigm of His day, and for good reason: being overly admired spiritually is the death knell of integrity. It creates such a mess! To borrow Jesus’s words, it protects hypocrisy, creating “cup and dish leaders” that are incredibly shiny and clean on the outside, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. And that leader will not lead you well, because you will become a commodity, a means to an end, a caricature. Jesus is the sole hero, the only leader truly worth His salt.
I have a way better idea.
After my last book release, I invited my entire volunteer launch team to my house for a big party, so almost three hundred women came from virtually every state. We’d been deep diving into real life together for half a year (and still to this very day more than two years later), so coming together was less about Going to Jen’s House and more about finally meeting treasured friends face-to-face. After the party, one of our girls, Corie, came up with the best solution to celebrity culture, which we’d worked terribly hard to dismantle in our little community:
Fangirl Jesus, and fangirl your friends.
Yes. Truly, I want you to freak out over Jesus. Now that thrills me. Save your best devotion for Him, because Jesus is so worthy of stars in our eyes, butterflies in our stomachs, heart palpitations in our chests. He really is, man. What is not to love about a guy who pulled children onto His lap and saved a failing party and touched the untouchables and told off the religious elite? I have always said that if you don’t love Jesus, you just don’t know Him. He is the full and complete jam, and we would all be fighting to sit by Him at dinner if He was here now (and you know He would sit by the most wretched, broken-down person there and give everyone else FOMO). I cannot wait to meet Jesus in heaven. He is my favorite.
Then fangirl the flesh and blood people around you, the ones you live by, live with, live for. Go gaga over your own people; that is well-placed loyalty. Overvalue them, over-love them, over-encourage them. Rather than overloading the top-heavy accounts, we should put far more love deposits in other columns, diversify the portfolio, spread out the investment, bank locally.
One of my girlfriends created a text rule, which basically means anytime she has a lovely thought about someone or is reminded of them in any way or notices something delightful about a person, she immediately sends them a quick text saying so. She just voice-texts it, so it is always full of weird misspellings and nonsense words (“You are such a wonderful chair leader [cheerleader] for women! You practical need tampons [pompoms]!”), but she sends the love before the thought leaves her mind, which increases the chance of delivery by around 100 percent. This is not taxing or hard or time-consuming, but she fangirls people better than anyone. We live for her texts.
Fangirl the people who never get fangirled. You know the ones: the underdog, the quiet hero, the little guy. They are shy or behind the scenes or difficult or loners. It’s boring when the same old obvious people get all the enthusiasm; the spotlight naturally gravitates toward certain folks in our culture, those who fit the template. But the earth is jam-packed with amazing, extraordinary people who color outside the narrow lines society deems noteworthy, and they deserve applause too.
Remy’s elementary school has grade-level awards ceremonies every nine weeks where they celebrate all kinds of achievements: academic, social, physical, relational. The end of the year includes overall, yearlong awards voted on by the kids. Last year, building suspense with dramatic pauses, our principal called up the Buda Elementary Employee of the Year: Head Custodian Josie Garza. She ran up to the stage, shell-shocked with both hands covering her face. The entire auditorium lost their minds, and I choked down sobs until I nearly passed out. Quiet, gentle, accomplishing her hard workday in and day out with generosity and cheerfulness—what a joy to fangirl Ms. Garza! Three cheers for all the Ms. Garzas! May we find them, love them, and celebrate them.
I realize some of you are lonely, and no one is texting you love notes when they catch you being awesome. I’ll give the same advice I give my kids when they are struggling socially: If you want to make good friends, be a good friend. Send kindness out in big, generous waves, send it near and far, send it through texts and e-mails and calls and words and hugs, send it by showing up, send it by proximity, send it in casseroles, send it with a well-timed “me too,” send it with abandon. Put out exactly what you hope to draw in, and expect it back in kind and in equal measure.
I am so convinced we reap what we sow here; sow seeds of affirmation and goodness and grace into others, and you will reap the devotion of well-loved friends. You will. You cannot love others genuinely and generously and have it return void for long. Convinced my dance card was full with no room for new relationships, I have literally had some now dear friends wear me the freak down with kindness (and sarcasm because that is my primary love language), like a rushing river of love eventually smoothing out this jagged, call-screening rock until I eventually said, “FINE. I love you. My gosh, you made me.”
Inversely, sow seeds of silence or uninvolvement or high-maintenance entitlement, and you will likely reap an empty inbox. I mean this tenderly, sisters. Psalms tells us that “deep calls to deep,” and similarly, grace calls to grace, joy calls to joy, laugh
ter calls to laughter, sincerity calls to sincerity. Unfortunately in the same way, drama calls to drama, dysfunction calls to dysfunction, bitterness calls to bitterness, cynicism calls to cynicism. We get back what we put out. We have so much say-so in our own relational experience. Be the friend you’d love to have, call to the deep, and you will attract the treasured kind of friends like sunlight, like a lightning rod, like honey.
Fangirl your friends.
This would be so good for all of us. No need to fangirl this yahoo. Let’s free one another up to occupy appropriate roles for one another as encouragers and cheerleaders, fellow learners and dreamers, like friends, like allies, like sisters. That feels safe and right and good to me. I’m all here for that, for you, for us. Be good to each other. Let’s heal the world together. We each have a note to play, and I’m glad to play mine, grateful to be a tiny part in a big, beautiful, wonderful, sisterhood song.
From birth to age 18 a girl needs good parents. From 18 to 35 she needs good looks. From 35 to 55 she needs a good personality. From 55 on, she needs cash.1
— SOPHIE TUCKER
CHAPTER 21
WE WERE SORT OF MEDIUM
Dear Parents,
Mom, today is your sixty-fifth birthday, which means you and Dad are both officially able to retire as well as receive the senior discount at Luby’s. Congratulations. You cannot beat the Luann Platter for $5.99. Your son and oldest grandson would be happy to take you there to celebrate, because, as you know, they are Luby’s evangelists. Grandma King raised us right; we love a cafeteria.
Anyway, I thought I’d write you and Dad some thoughts on Growing Up King. The sibs and I have discussed and have nearly identical assessments. The only departure is their extra gratitude for getting bailed out of jail. As the sole dependent who hasn’t seen the inside of a cell, I confess I have lied to you about a bunch of other stuff, so let’s just call it even and leave you to bask in the glow of no longer raising us. Teenagers are delightful! (We cannot believe you were teetotalers back then.)
One of the lamest things about raising kids is how they don’t fully appreciate you until they are grown. What a chore to suffer the self-righteousness, exasperated sighs, and sassy mouths, and you endured all that and then some. I mean, we were some oppressed children (roll eyes here). Would it have killed you to buy one pair of Guess jeans and subscribe to MTV? Nobody knew the trouble we saw.
But then we grew up and discovered we’d had an amazing childhood. My first clue came in college when tons of my friends had broken families and worked three jobs to put themselves through school. It never even occurred to me to worry about funding my degree, much less detaching from toxic parents. As it turned out, we’d been cradled in security since the day we were born. Oh sure, we didn’t have much money, but I had no idea. Our life never felt scarce or fragile. Now I know you scrimped and worried, but we never felt that then. You gave us real security, the kind that settles down in your bones and insulates you from fear. (To this day, I cannot muster up much fear. I am overconfident in this world and its people, which you can either take the blame or credit for.)
We have reams to be thankful for. I could fill the rest of this book with it. But since this is just a letter, not a comprehensive family history, I thought I’d mention three specific gifts you gave us:
First, thank you for raising us in a fun and funny home. Our house was filled to the rafters with laughter and absurdity. We were not overly earnest or intense, and we learned that a healthy life meant taking a handful of things incredibly seriously and most other things less seriously. You never majored on minors, and it liberated us from a sense of failure. Some of my friends were criticized within an inch of their lives growing up, and they still struggle deeply with self-assurance, contentment, joy. There is a place for a “no big deal” outlook, for the ability to laugh instead of cringe, to find humor instead of offense. We were not constantly avoiding critique, so we were free to just be normal kids with laid-back parents who quoted funny movies. To say nothing of piling into one bed with Dad every night while he told demented bedtime stories like “The Electrocution and Dismemberment of the Big Bad Wolf” and that time he and Uncle Tom shot Grandma’s cats because they slept on their freshly waxed cars. Sweet dreams, kids.
It worked out. Plus, we are hilarious now. Remember that girlfriend Drew had a few years ago who never laughed at our jokes and didn’t respond to our Gold Material? Goodbye and godspeed, ma’am. You (mainly Dad) groomed sweeping, dramatic storytellers; we can take one small experience and turn it into a stand-up routine. It is an obnoxious, self-congratulatory skill set, but here we are. It’s so fun to be together as grown-ups, because someone will always be on. If not us, our spouses, because humor was obviously a marriage prerequisite. Like the time Zac told us about his high school garage band Burning Animosity: “We didn’t sing or play instruments, but we were going to learn. What mattered was that we had a band name. Then life happened. Someone fell in love. Someone got grounded. Stuff went down. Story as old as time.” No one makes us laugh like ZZ.
Fun and funny is underrated. It’s interesting—laughter has a way of drowning out lesser memories; it pulls through as the lead story. We certainly had dark seasons and sorrows and missteps, like that time you slapped me across the face for just telling my truth, Mom, but those didn’t leave the most lasting impression. They didn’t become the headline. They were subplots beneath the primary storyline of love and security.
This gives me hope as I am still neck deep in family minutia here; time hasn’t minimized the failures or monotony or the daily crapshoot of supervising five kids. It’s all still a bit too precious, and I regularly worry the latest misfire will be the thing they’ll remember most. So acknowledging the staying power of general tone over particulars is such a comfort; hopefully they’ll remember the laughter more than that time I threw all their dirty laundry in the backyard.
Second, thanks for being super into us. We grew up with fans. I’d be remiss not to single you out here, Dad, because your particular brand of enthusiasm is, as we all know, legendary. All four of us sincerely believed we were special children, that the universe blessed us with talent and charm, intelligence and wit. We bought all your hype. You believed in us irrationally, which made us accidentally confident. We were solidly in our twenties before discovering we were just sort of medium, but by that point, it was too late; we missed the window of insecurity and entered adulthood like, Here we are! (And the world was like, So? Which did not deter us in the slightest.)
Heaven have mercy on the authorities that didn’t recognize our specialness or, dare I recall, oppressed us: teachers, coaches, principals, neighbors, bosses, academic deans, other parents, arresting officers—they faced many a losing battle, those poor souls. And sure, Dad, you mainly led this brigade, but Mom occasionally went Red Rage, too, like that time my media teacher gave me the only C in the class, a class with no real grades, because he didn’t like me. (It is no wonder he retired the next year.) To this day, Dad, you offer to censure social media haters with a swift word, but since I am a forty-two-year-old grown adult person, having my dad defend me on Facebook is probably unnecessary.
Another childhood staple that permanently affected my trajectory was your liberal and generous commitment to your friends. Your friends (and consequently their kids) were such a constant presence in our life, we grew up assuming genuine community was a given. We spent as much time at your friends’ houses as our own, and I can hardly remember a vacation or trip or Sunday night barbecue without another family or two with us. We watched you and your friends laugh and cry and group parent us together, and it set a vitally important bar for my life: healthy adult friends are a priority and life is better alongside them.
I never knew otherwise, so I pursued wholehearted, wholly devoted friendships as an adult. My friends are so deeply embedded in our life that I honestly cannot picture my story without them. I grew up learning transparency and vulnerability, commitment and solidarity.
I never had to read a book on “developing natural community,” because childhood was my classroom and you were my teachers. I learned the secret sauce by experience: time together and lots of it, laughter, truth telling, grace, authenticity, God. It became as natural as the air I breathe: friends matter.
In a very rare moment of transparency, another pastor’s wife once confided that despite her easy breezy lively persona, she actually had no real friends, because the vulnerability was too risky. She “gave women just enough to feel connected to her” but nothing real. She and her husband were locked away on their own island, friendly with many but committed to none, and not one person actually knew her. It was maybe the saddest thing I’d ever heard. Thank you for teaching me to love and be loved by friends fully, entirely, recklessly, because my life is immensely richer for it.
I am in what one of my favorite writers, Kelly Corrigan, calls “The Middle Place” (which you obviously know because I made us all read her book since her father, Greenie, is Dad’s personality twin). That wonderful sweet spot as an active mom but still very much someone’s daughter. If I could, I would freeze time to preserve these treasured years with all my kids at home while having vibrant, healthy parents. It is so comforting that even while spinning all the plates of career, ministry, marriage, and parenthood, at your house I am still just your oldest kid who may or may not help with the dishes. I still crave your approval and want to make you proud. I still want you to tell me what to do sometimes. My car still heads straight to your house in moments of crisis. When we suffered a bit of collapse last year, I told Brandon at the onset: “I just need to call my mom.”