Dear seventeen year old, Charity.
I see you. In your room, playing your guitar and singing at the top of your lungs. Penning your own lyrics while you figure out the chord progressions for every Jennifer Knapp and Sarah Masen song. Sketching and looking out of your window at the trees and the field across the street. Praying and reading your Bible with conviction and fervor. Planning the next Friday morning Bible study.
Don’t worry – I am you. I mean, I’m thirty-eight year old you. Me. Us. Whatever. You get it.
First off, you never dye your hair red with blonde chunks, but you do finally get your nose pierced 🙂 And no, you still don’t have a Taylor 814ce guitar. But you do get a pick up truck! 🙂
Here’s the deal. Our 20 year high school reunion is this weekend, and I’m going Friday night, so it has me thinking a lot about you and some things I’d like to share with you, things I wish you could know.
Don’t freak out when I tell you this. Ok?
I see how much you love your friends. I see the way you pour yourself fully into each friendship. It’s beautiful – and you know what? Twenty years later, you will still love with all you are. The faces are going to change, but the love you find from your new friends is going to give you wings. I promise. It’s going to a be a long time before the friends you have fade away, so go on – keep loving them just as much, just as hard.
I see your love for God. You think he is so big. And you know what, hun? She is even more expansive than you can ever dream or imagine. They/Love/SHE is going to become a greater and greater mystery, and it’s going to cost you everything to figure that out. But don’t worry. You’re going to gain so much more.
You don’t know it yet, but the next few years are going to hold some very heavy things. Heavier than what you could even imagine. And it’s then, Char, that you are going to witness and experience the truth in ways that will be simultaneously heartbreaking and healing. You’re going to get hurt. You’re going to doubt, for the first time in your life, and then you’re going to believe again – but better, and different, expansive.
I see you watching VH1 and listening to Melissa Etheridge and KD Lang and the Indigo Girls. I see the way you look at that girl at school and that girl at church. I know how deeply you care for both of them. I know how much you hide it, and I see you lying on the floor at night, trying to pray the gay away.
Charity, listen. There is nothing wrong with you. You know what is going on this week? In 2019? You just taught a workshop on LGBTQ+ Spirituality, and it was featured in the Chattanooga Times. Seriously. And Chattanooga has grown so much.
You know what else happened? Some of your poems were published in an anthology called Smitten: This Is What Love Looks Like.
All poems about women who love women.
I know – that scares you. But l promise it’s beautiful, and healing, and freeing. I know you think that means you abandon faith and God, but darlin, you are coming home.
When I go to the reunion on Friday, I’m going to hold you in my heart. I’ll look over at the parking lot and smile at the fact that you shared your first kiss and only kiss to a guy in the old gym. Then I’ll smile again and even bigger at the fact you shared your first kiss with the love of your life, the woman who will be your wife, fifteen years later, in her car, in the high school parking lot.
That’s right. She’s amazing, Charity, and she is yours and you are hers, and your marriage is every dream you could hope for yourself. You have two amazing kids, too. Life gets so much better than what you dream for yourself, looking at your Campus Life, CCM, and Brio Magazines. So just hang on, ok? And don’t believe what the jerks say.
I have to go now. I’m editing a novel. Yep, you finally finish one.
I just had to tell you really quickly that you don’t grow up to be the next Jennifer Knapp. (She came out, too, by the way!) But you do grow up to be the best Charity that you can be.
I see you. I am you. I hear you. I love you.
Keep on, love. Love on.
C.