I walked by Kate’s room in the evenings and saw her sitting on the floor beside her bed. I could clearly hear that she was having a very serious conversation with someone.
“Hey, who are you talking to?”
“God.”
“Ooookay. I’ll just leave you to that.”
I’d listen for a while and sure enough, she was talking to God. It usually sounded something like this:
“Dear God, how are you? I’m okay. I got into trouble at school today for hitting Bobby. But he deserved it because he was picking on Rachel and you would have hit him too. But I’m sorry for hitting Bobby and I promise to be good tomorrow. I got a good grade in spelling and I played on my bike after school. And I ate all my dinner and I hope you had a good dinner too. And please hug Jesus for me and bless my mommy and dad and my dog and my rabbits and everybody in the whole wide world. Amen.”
She wrote songs about Jesus and wanted to sing them to everyone. At our dinner parties, Kate could be found reminding one of our guests that gossip wasn’t very nice and the Bible had a lot to say about it. Then she’d go get one of her Bibles and find a verse that matched the occasion. My friends thought she was odd and wonderful. They all felt very convicted to be better people—at least while they were visiting our house.
I’ll never forget how much in love she was with Jesus. It’s what I cling to now when I feel like she’s going straight to hell for being such a mouthy, disrespectful, lazy lump of flesh.
When Kate was nine years old, we discovered that her step-dad (my husband and her favorite person in the world at that time) was gay. So Kate and I left Montana, I went through a painful divorce, and my little girl and I started a new life—alone—together in Nashville, TN. We hadn’t been in town a month when Kate looked at me one day and said, “Mom, there’s no one looking out for us up there.” And I said, “You’re probably right.”
