Friday, July 19, 2024
7:12 p.m.
Dear Paul and everyone else reading/listening along to Material Girl with us,
As we hit the middle of Chapter 28, I am once again horrified by my behavior. I told you it doesn’t go so well when I am raised with everything handed to me. It always takes the loss of a mother or a really mean opera tutor who puts me to work seven days a week as a child to turn me into something resembling a respectable human.
Perhaps I’m being harsh on myself, but I’m not the subject of this letter.
Instead, I wanted to talk about the question both Robin and Jake are asking: “Is love enough?”
Both know that they are in love. But both want assurances on what their future will hold. They both want to know if they will stay in love, no matter what.
Neither one wants to have their heart broken.
And that – my loves – is a theme I am seeing over and over again in our stories. Some of us have missed out on being in a relationship at all because we were too scared of “losing our friendship.”
Some of us have missed out of years of being married because we were in love for years and years and years but neither one said anything. Instead, we endured the painful heartache of watching each other date.
And that just hurt the people we dated. It was highly unfair to them. We wasted their time and broke their hearts. They could tell we were in love and yet we would deny it, just so that we wouldn’t lose the other person or put ourselves at risk of “getting hurt.”
I knew I loved Nick and I still decided to walk away. I knew that I would marry him if I dated him, and that – to do so – it would open my heart up so wide that it could be crushed. And I thought, “I know I’ll never love again. But at least I won’t be torn wide open.”
Looking back, I think I was seeing my life now. I didn’t want to live through the pain of watching Nick walk our our door – over and over and over again – when I needed him the most.
But, the moment I decided to walk away, a friend of mine who lived very far away suddenly walked through the front door of my business. I was alone. I thought the door was locked. I thought he lived hours away.
He looked at me, and said, “What’s wrong?”
I told him.
And he said, “Don’t make my mistake. Don’t live without love.”
I stared at him.
“Remember Kathy?” he asked. I nodded. Everyone remembered Kathy. She made him glow. And he made her glow. And when they split up, the whole world around them seemed to collapse. And no one could get a really straight answer on why they split. Something about who Kathy’s daughter was dating. But that seemed like a very small reason for this guy. They were crazy about each other, and the love affected everyone around them.
“We didn’t break up because of her daughter,” he said.
“What!?”
“I loved her. And that scared me. So I broke up with her. And now you see who I live with.”
I gulped. I had never compared the two relationships. But now that he mentioned it, it was like night and day – heaven and hell. Ohhhhh noooo….
“Do NOT make the same mistake I did,” he told me sternly. “Do NOT live without love.”
And that was it. I did a 180° right then and there, only freaking out two other times: when Nick proposed and when I went down the aisle. Both times I cried out of pure and unadulterated fear of the future.
But everything in between was better than anything I could have ever dreamed. I wouldn’t be who I am today without Nick. I felt more freedom to be myself when he was around than when he wasn’t. And that was a very, very new concept for me.
But I didn’t think of Nick and I when I listened to the car ride home between Robin and Jake. Instead, I thought of a conversation I had with the Lord when I began Book of Katherine.
Before I started my channel, relationships had become something “old people did.” I hadn’t seen anyone under 30 holding hands for years. I didn’t even see couples under 30 – and rarely under 40 too.
I remember walking around Disneyland with Nick and holding his hand in our early 30’s. And boy, did it make us stick out. We had so many compliments from older generations saying things like, “Aw, it’s so nice, dear, to see a young couple in love!!!” that we started paying attention.
Oh. No one else our age was holding hands. In fact, there weren’t really any couples our age. Most were older than us.
And then, I began Book of Katherine. And of course, because I talked about anything and everything, I talked about love and marriage and family…
And the next thing I know, everyone is getting married. It suddenly begins a trend. Agents are suddenly announcing that their young clients are all engaged. Awards shows began focusing their cameras in on couples of all ages holding hands.
And the wave even hit the Order.
And I freaked out. I didn’t want marriage and love to be a trend! That wasn’t what I was looking for! And so I went to the Lord.
“All these people are suddenly getting married, Lord!!!” And He asked me why that was a problem. “Well, divorces cost an average of a quarter of a million dollars! i don’t want to sink all these people into debt!”
The Lord had been very clear that the new trend was my influence. I didn’t think one channel could change that much. But I didn’t know a lot about myself back then.
Anyhow, looking back i realize that I was very worried that all these couples were taking too big of a risk by getting married. And I felt terribly responsible for it. How could I have lead them astray!?
So I asked how I could fix it. Oh, I asked the Lord in so many different ways, “What do you want me to say to eliminate the risk in getting married!?!?”
And do you know what the Lord said?
“Have faith.”
I felt like I had been hit with a baseball bat. He wanted me to put my faith in love, to put my faith in marriage, to put my faith in the love these couples shared.
And that’s when I realized that there was not, nor would there ever be, a guarantee for our futures when we say yes to love.
Robin and Jake will never ever know how the future would turn out. But Jake has put his faith in love. His faith in love has given him the courage to put himself out there and declare his love, more than once.
And the reason i am ashamed of myself as Robin is because I do not have faith in love. It will take me losing him to realize what I have, I am sure.
Oh, maybe I, as Robin, will sustain the pain of losing Jake, sure. But turning our backs on love has other consequences. We go against the natural order of things. The Lord is love, and to turn our backs on love is to turn our backs on the Lord.
And there will always be a price to pay for doing that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the price that turns my head as Robin.
Who knows how it will play out. There aren’t many more chapters left and we know the book will end with us together, so it’s just a matter of how it works out.
Will the angels arrange some crazy storm again, as they do for Krasinski in Tempting the Laird? Or will they cause a car to fail, leaving them stranded together, as the angels did for Downey in The Scoundrel and the Debutante?
Or have the angels already done their work, by giving Robin’s mom the courage to walk out on her husband for neglecting to love the daughter the Lord gave him? We shall see.
But one thing I do know: the gift of love is not to be trifled with. It is very rare and very potent and it casts spells unlike any I have ever seen.
And we will never know where it leads us. As C.S. Lewis described the Lord in his Narnia books, Love “isn’t safe, but he is good.”
All my love,
Katherine
Book of Katherine 