Living Through the Loss of your Daughter - Kate Merrick
Steve Gatena: [00:00:00] Welcome to Pray.com's Relentless Hope, a podcast that'll help you love your life, lead with purpose, and leave a legacy of helping others. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I'm your host, Steve Gatena. Let's get started with today's episode of Relentless Hope
While searching for a final option to cure her daughter's cancer. Kate Merrick and her family found themselves in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Kate Merrick: The third week of September. The first year my daughter was in kindergarten. I was so excited to drop them off at school. My husband's a surfer. I'm a surfer. He is a pastor at that time, and pastor's day off is Monday, and so that's when we got to hang out, so we dropped our kids off at school.
And we turned around, went back down the freeway and we were hanging out, picking out surfboards at the factory, just living our best life. We're about to go surfing, and I get a phone call and it's a friend who works at my kid's school, and she said, Daisy fell down on the playground and she's hurt pretty bad.
You need to come and get her. So we turned the car back around, drove back up to Santa Barbara to pick our kids up or to pick Daisy. And when I go into the office, she's vomiting and she's because of the pain and she's in and out of consciousness, and so we think this isn't good. So we take her to the hospital and she's in the ICU for hours and hours.
By the end of the day, a nurse walks in and she's got a box of tissues and she's with an oncologist. And I knew I didn't know what an oncologist was or did, but I knew what the tissues were for.[00:02:00]
Steve Gatena: In part one of this three part series on Relentless Hope, Kate Merrick tells us how she became closer to God through the loss of her daughter Daisy. She understood how she was blessed by diving into God's word and learning from the women of the Bible.
Kate Merrick: I met Jesus when I was 19 years old. I was living a crazy lifestyle. I was partying and drugs and boys and everything that comes with it. And I had been dating this boy named Brit, and I remember one night we were at a party and he asked me if I wanted to go to a Bible study and I thought, oh yeah, I'm a Christian.
I'll go. I thought I knew, I thought I was a Christian. I thought I knew what it was to walk with Jesus, and I really had no idea. And so we go to this Bible study and as we open our Bibles and the word of God just comes alive, I was just blown out of the water. I thought, what? This is a good deal. Jesus loves me.
He wants to take these things that are hurting me and give me something better. And I was all in both feet just loving Jesus and. I'll tell this story in the leadership portion, but, uh, we end up loving Jesus and, and, you know, really walking away from a radical lifestyle and, and we end up serving God and, and we plant a church and we just have this blessed life.
We plant a church in Carpinteria. It's successful from the beginning. I'm married. I've got a wonderful, hardworking husband. I've got two beautiful kids. I. , uh, an eight year old son named Isaiah, a five-year-old daughter named Daisy. And we lived in a pretty little house, in a pretty little beach [00:04:00] town, and I was just so blessed and I thought, you know, God really loves me.
I'm really, really blessed this, this is a successful life. So my definition of blessed was basically the American dream the third week of September, the first. My daughter was in kindergarten. I was so excited to drop them off at school. My husband's a surfer. I'm a surfer. He is a pastor at that time, and pastor's day off is Monday.
And so that's when we got to hang out. So we dropped our kids off at school, we turned around, went back down the freeway, and we were hanging out, picking out surfboards at the factory, just living our best life, about to go surfing, and I get a phone. and it's a friend who works at my kid's school and she said, Daisy fell down on the playground and she's hurt pretty bad.
You need to come and get her. So we turned the car back around, drove back up to Santa Barbara to pick our kids up or to pick Daisy up. And when I go into the office, she's vomiting and she's because of the pain and she's in and out of consciousness, and so we think this isn't good. So we take her to the hospital and she's in the ICU for hours and hours.
By the end of the day, a nurse walks in and she's got a box of tissues and she's with an oncologist. And I knew, I didn't know what an oncologist was or did, but I knew what the tissues were for, and that doctor looked me in the face and said, Your daughter has cancer. There's a tumor the size of Nerf football growing in her belly, and we're gonna need to operate.
It's going to be a long, dangerous surgery. She's gonna need six weeks of radiation [00:06:00] and eight months of chemotherapy in my life turned upside down. All that blessing, all that shiny, happy, pretty Jesus loves me. I'm a good Christian. I'm blessed all that life, it just seemed to turn a hundred percent upside down.
So we spent 11 days in the hospital the first time we were there. And, and I remember coming home and just realizing this is my life now. And just not getting it. And we spent, you know, we had, we had faith, we prayed. It was hard. We would spend sometimes a month at a time in the hospital and Daisy would be getting treatment.
She lost all her. She lost a ton of weight. She was sick and frail. We had to be isolated from friends because we couldn't risk germs coming in the house. We had to miss out on all the fun things that everyone else was doing, all the, the blessed life that everyone else was living. It just wasn't part of our life.
And we were sad. We were isolated, we were lonely, we were hurting, and just watching my daughter be hurt over and over and over in all those months. So finally after eight months of chemotherapy, we finished treatment and they say, okay, we don't see any evidence of disease. But within four weeks we were back in the hospital with another tumor the size of a grapefruit.
And so that was what the next three years were like, just in and out of the hospital. The cancer could not be beat, it would not go away. And finally we ended up facing the doctors and they said there's nothing we can do for her. [00:08:00] She's exhausted every treatment we can think of in American pediatric oncology and.
Basically we can make her comfortable at this point. Well, that wasn't good enough for me. I thought, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna set it out. What can we do? How can we figure out a plan? Is there any alternative treatment? And at that time, we had a blog called Pray for Daisy, and it was huge. We had over a million unique visitors and hundreds of thousands of people were praying for.
and I thought, okay, we could do this. God is going to say yes to my prayer. He is going to answer my prayer. And we put out a message saying, okay, does anyone know of any alternative treatment we can do? And you know, we did everything for her. We anointed her with oil and we had the elders pray for her. , we got all kinds of suggestions.
We got some crazy suggestions of, well, if you drink this certain mushroom tea, or if you eat these weird nuts, or all kinds of crazy suggestions, and honestly, when you're about to lose your child, you're open to anything. But the best option we heard was there's a doctor in Tel Aviv, Israel, and he is doing experimental treatment.
and people are getting some success out there. So we decide, okay, that's our best chance to save Daisy's life. We are going to raise money and we are gonna get our family out there. And so we raise the money, we get ready, we do all the things we need to do to get. . When we take a look at each other and we decide, okay, we are gonna dive into the deep end here.
We're gonna go to Israel. We have no idea how long we're gonna be there, but we're gonna go off the grid and we're gonna just go deep. [00:10:00] And so we decide we're going off of our social media, we're gonna leave our iPhones in America and we're gonna tell our families, we will email you once a week. But other than.
we're just gonna go be present. We're gonna go be present with each other. We're gonna go be present with the Lord. We're gonna try and save Daisy's life. So we moved to Israel, the four of us, my son, my daughter, my husband, and me. And we just lean in. We lean into listening to the Lord, we lean into treatment.
We lean into, uh, the question of why. And honestly, we spent days on end. Begging God for healing and asking why. And I'd like to say that, you know, we were in the Holy Land and God spoke to us and it was so beautiful, but honestly we didn't hear much from him. We did not hear much from him, and I think now in hindsight, it's because we were asking the wrong question.
We were asking why, when we should have been asking who. And though he was silent when we were in Israel and giving us the answer to the question that we wanted, we knew he was with us and we could look back on the last three years and know and see he was with us in the. He was with us in treatment. He was with us when she was, well, he was with us when she was rediagnosed, and even though we didn't hear much from him, he was with us in Israel.
So after a few months in Israel, we can see that she's not getting much better and it's time to move back to America. So we pack up, we move back to America, and with a month within a month. She is diagnosed for the fourth and final [00:12:00] time with another tumor that has spread. And in the middle of the night she took her final breath in our arms, in our bedroom, and her spirit left her body and went to heaven, and we worshiped God who gives and takes away.
And we handed her body over to the men who show up in suits in the night to take away your loved one's body. And we set our final goodbyes to Daisy Love. And I just went dark. That question of why it came back up. Why, why, why did you take. I had faith. God, I had faith. We did all the things right. We were serving you.
We weren't living the lifestyle that we used to live. We got saved when we served you and we were telling people about you, and we were doing everything right. Why won't you bless me? Why won't you save her? I know you can. And so for the next. Three years after Daisy died, I had a lot to say to the Lord and I had a lot to hear from him.
And you know, one of the things he showed me is that he knows what it's like to experience an unanswered prayer, and that the night before Jesus was crucified, he himself asked. Please, please, please take this cup from me, but if not, your [00:14:00] will be done, not mine. And you know, honestly, I had been feeling like Jesus was kind of just up in heaven with his arms crossed like, yeah, stinks to be you, man.
Your kid died. That must hurt a. , but when I read the word, just like in the beginning when I read the the word and it became alive to me, I saw no, Jesus knows what it's like to experience pain and loss and suffering, and hunger and thirst and sadness, and anger. He knows what it's like. He has not left me alone to feel these things on my own.
And for the next couple of years, I, I just, I quit writing on the blog. I quit speaking. I just honed in and focused in on the Lord and what he had to teach me. And he showed me I was with you. I know what it's like. I feel your pain too. And then he also showed me that I had a hundred percent different definition of the word blessed than he.
Because I thought I was so blessed, right? We had a successful church, I had beautiful children. We lived in a pretty house. I had a great marriage and I thought, well, that's what being blessed is. I must be doing something right. God loves me. I'm obviously blessed, and God showed me through the word, there is a different definition for blessing, and he showed me through women of the Bible.
Sarah wife of Abraham, Bathsheba, but especially married, the mother of Jesus because Mary lived a radical life and what we see, what I saw in the word when he, when he [00:16:00] Abraham, Bathsheba, but especially married, and showing me these things is. The night that Gabriel told Mary she was gonna be mother of Messiah, he called her blessed among women.
He called her favored. And we read that scripture around east or around Christmas time, right? And we, we think, oh, Mary, she's, she's just, she's goals, right? She is hashtag goals. She's what we all wanna be. She's amazing. This is glamorous. She's mother of Messiah. She's got it all. She's in a really great spot here.
But what I see when I keep reading is something very different. This is what I see. I see a woman who wasn't welcome In Bethlehem, I see a woman who gave birth in a dirty cave. , I see a woman who became a refugee when her son was only just a baby. I see a woman who was mocked in her hometown because of her pregnancy, her, her son, and his supposed, um, status as Messiah.
I mean, who's gonna believe that? Who's gonna believe that? In fact, Joseph was gonna divorce her because he thought she was unfaithful. . And in those days, if you were unfaithful that you could, that was worthy of death. You could be stoned by your father or your fiance, and yet she's considered blessed and favored.
How is that blessed and favored? And not only was the beginning rough and Jesus' childhood rough losing him. in Jerusalem, at Passover, and all the things that come with this radical lifestyle. When his ministry on Earth was over, she watched her son be [00:18:00] tortured and killed in front of her very eyes. Is that blessed?
Is that blessing? because in my Western mind it, it makes no sense. That's, that's not blessing, but this is the word of God. This is the word of God that changed me in the beginning and I believe it and I trust it. And that changed everything for me, that made it for me to go from a place of deep bitterness and pain and questioning to a place of actual freedom and joy, and I.
I had a, I had a turnaround. It was okay, Lord, I was wrong. I didn't know what blessing meant. I didn't, I, I, I changed my perspective. It was, Lord, I'm gonna trust you. With this, and I'm gonna say that I am blessed to have had Daisy in my life for eight and a half years rather than, how come I didn't get her for longer than eight and a half years?
I'm gonna say, God, you are with me, and that is worth everything. I'm gonna say I believe you and trust you that things may be different than what they look on the surface. And ultimately it's the word of God, Jesus. The word made flesh That took me from a crazy heathen girl to planting churches, to having children, to giving one of my children over to heaven and burying her.
That has brought me from a place of bitterness and questioning. To a place of actual true joy. And there's so much freedom there to trust God because I believe that he loves Mary, mother of Jesus. After all, he chose her to birth the son of [00:20:00] God. And if I believe that he loves Mary, I can believe that he loves me and there is no greater freedom than walking.
In the deep love of Jesus and understanding that he suffers when we suffer and that he loves us with a love. So great, we can't even imagine. And so now, rather than asking why, why when tough stuff comes up, because it just keeps coming up . Nothing has been as hard as handing my baby girl over. But instead of asking why, I know I've learned.
You ask who, who? How am I gonna see you in this? What are you gonna do in this? How can I trust you in this? What are you gonna speak to me in this situation? And we don't have to be afraid of suffering anymore. I mean, it's awful. It's hard, but it's not uncommon to the human experience. Every Bible hero we know.
Has suffered and has sinned, and we would do well to learn from their examples and to realize we need to get a different definition of blessing than the one that our cul, our culture tells us. Because if we're hanging on so tightly to the life that we think is ours, the life we think we want, we would do well to be open-handed with Jesus and say, you know you can do this.
What you. And I trust you in this. God can do anything. And he took this girl from deep, deep pain and bitterness to true joy and true freedom.
And I think [00:22:00] that's where we can. The people that we lead is in grace, grace, grace, over and over, grace, never placing too high of an expectation on our people. Just like we don't want people to place expectations on us that are too high, but really leading someone toward Jesus in all of our leadership, authenticity, honesty, not to gain followers, but to serve.
I said that my favorite leader, the one I look up to the most is my husband, Britt, and that's because I see that he is the same person at home as he is from the pulpit. He's honest about his shortcomings. He truly seeks the Lord. That man has woken up at 4:00 AM to seek the Lord for as long as I've known him.
He puts in the time with Jesus. He's honest about who he is and where he's at, and he loves people accordingly. And he is the same man at home as he is in public. And I admire that more than any other trait in any leader, more than someone being dynamic or showy or super talented, it's authenticity.
Steve Gatena: In part two of this three part series on Relentless Hope, Kate Merrick tells us about the influence her husband Britt had on her life as a role model through being a leader at a college youth group to planting churches around the world. Kate learned that leadership is done through authenticity and selfless service to those around you.
Kate Merrick: I feel like leadership snuck up on me. , after I had gone to that Bible study with my boyfriend at the time, now husband, we [00:24:00] just decided that Jesus was so amazing we could not stop talking about him. And so I remember the first time we told someone about Jesus, we were at a surf contest and my husband was coaching the surfers at the time, and we were reading our Bibles on.
And this kid came up to us and said, Hey, what are you guys reading? And we said, the Bible. And he goes, what's the Bible? And we were like, what? What's the Bible? And we just, we told him everything from Genesis to Revelation. I remember for five hours straight, we were telling this kid all about Jesus and all about the word of God.
And the Lord spoke to us and said, Hey, there are kids here who don't know me and they need to know me. Will you tell. And so we decided that going around telling kids about Jesus was good, but hey, let's have a Bible study at your parents' house. So I would make cookies and brownies to get the kids there, and Brit would teach through the Bible and the kids showed up and they were getting saved and baptized, and.
We were given up bibles and it was radical. And, and, uh, right after we got married in 1998, the pastor at our church where we were going, said, will you take over the college ministry? And at that time, We had just gotten married and it just seemed like a crazy thing. Like what? That's crazy. And God told us both, you need to say yes to this.
And so we said yes. And I remember the first Friday night, there were eight kids there, and within the next year there were, 800 kids. God was blessing it. And it was just the pure word of God. You show up, we're gonna, we're gonna tell you the truth, we're gonna give you the Bible, we're gonna worship God.
And those days I, I look back with such nostalgia. . I would work all day at my job at the [00:26:00] surf shop and then we'd set up the chairs and I'd bring snacks and when it got too big to, to feed everyone snacks, I would, I would clean up the chairs and I would clean up trash at midnight. I mean, we would worship the Lord and.
pray together all the things until midnight. And then I got pregnant with my first son, and I just remember being eight months pregnant and picking candy wrappers up off the ground and just serving and serving and serving. And I loved it. I loved it. There were kids at our house all the time. college kids.
There would be someone sleeping on our couch, someone sleeping on our floor. Someone would come and just stay a week and not go home. And it just, it kind of leadership just took us by surprise. Next thing you know, we've got 900 college kids who come every week. We're leading a, we're leading a, a group of other leaders.
We're mentoring kids. We're meeting one-on-one, and, it just snuck up on us. Six years into that, the Lord says to us that he wants us to plant a church. And we thought, okay, this is weird because, you know, we'd always thought, well, we'll do this college gig until, you know, maybe till we have kids or, you know, but we're, we're, we're in the surf industry here.
My husband's family owned Channel Islands Surfboards at the time, and my husband. Shaping and designing surfboards. And I was working at the retail store and the plan was that he would take over the wholesale business and I would take over the retail business, but God had a different plan for us. He said, Nope, you're actually going to plant churches.
And it was crazy. And I remember just knowing without a shadow of the doubt, this is what God has for. So we had to talk to his parents and [00:28:00] say, God is leading us in a different direction. This is kind of what we feel he's asking us to do. And his parents love the Lord. And they said, yep, I think you're right.
And next thing you know, we've got this baby church. So we plant this baby church and the Lord is all over it. Our first Sunday, 500 people. And not only do we have this church, but within a few years we start birthing churches from our church. And so today in 2019, there are nine of us. We're called Reality, and the first one is at reality carpentry, and that's where we currently serve.
And. Leadership, I say just absolutely snuck up on us because we just kept meeting a need. We kept meeting a need. Whether that need was these surfers at the beach need to know about God, or these college kids need prayer. These college kids need someone, you know, to listen to them, to rebuke them, to feed them.
Leadership is all about service. And I remember the first time I really got an earful about it. Um, I, I showed up at church one day and there were all these college kids hanging around my husband's office and I remember thinking, ah, you have work to do. What are all these kids doing? They're taking up your time and your space.
And I pull my husband aside and I say, do you want me to get rid of these guys? Do you want me to tell them to go? And he said, this is true discipleship. This is what Jesus does. This is what leadership is. It's knowing people and making yourself known. It's not standing on a stage and you know, delivering a flawless sermon.
It's not having all the spotlight, spotlight on you. [00:30:00] It's meeting a need whether its, making brownies for kids to get them to come to Bible study or if it's spending time just hanging out with college guys. And so I would say that the leader I look up to most is my husband, Britt, because he has shown me what it looks like to be an authentic leader, what it looks like to serve.
At church, there is no mess. He's not willing to clean up. There is no person he's not willing to pray for. Leadership is service, and I think about Jesus and how he washed his disciples feet. I mean, this is God made flesh. Jesus girding himself with a towel and washing the dirty feet of his disciples, and not just the disciples that he liked the best, but the one who betrayed him, right?
Like the annoying ones or the crazy ones, or the zealous ones. Jesus is the ultimate servant, and that's who we learn leadership from. It's not to be seen, but it's to. And it's not just to be known as far as what your name is or what you're saying from the stage, but to be truly known and to let your heart be open, to be authentic in the way that you love others.
And these days, leadership looks a little different for me. We're not doing college ministry anymore. We lead a. . I lead a group of women online with my writing. I write books. I speak at retreats and conferences, and so leadership has a little different of a look for me these days, but the principles are the same if [00:32:00] I speak in such a way to get someone to notice.
then I'm not serving them well. If I can't be authentic in who I am and in where I've been, I'm not serving someone well. If I can't be honest about my failures and my sins and where I've come from. I'm not serving people well. Leadership is not about gaining followers. Leadership is not about like and subscribe and.
You know, admire you. It's not about getting comments on your social media. That's not leadership. Leadership is service. Leadership is inviting people into your space. I remember I used to teach a cooking class for the college girls, and I taught them how to make rice and beans and enchiladas, and it's bringing them into your home and not worrying about if it's fancy or how you seem.
Putting your arms around someone no matter where they're at and saying, girl, I love you. You just look like you needed a hug. Leadership says, I see you. I love you. And sometimes even me too, leadership doesn't act like we've never sinned or we don't struggle with the same things our people struggle with.
But leadership is authentic and honest. , but the most important thing about leadership is that true leadership and true ministry flows from intimacy, and that means intimacy with Jesus. If we cannot carry a true, authentic relationship with the Lord, we cannot lead other people well, whether that's in my writing or in my speaking.
If I'm not spending time with God, then what I [00:34:00] write. , it probably doesn't have a whole lot of value if what I'm writing is not from the motivation of what does Jesus have for this person. It's not gonna hold a lot of value. And so ultimately we wanna lead people to Jesus rather than leading them to us.
One of my favorite ways to lead and be. Is through grace and I think about the grace that Jesus had with the people that he led and how often his disciples would speak out wrongly or or freak out and, and he would put them in their place, but he always had grace. And I think that's where we can meet the people that we lead, is in grace, grace, grace, over and over, grace.
Never placing too high of an expectation on our people. Just like we don't want people to place expectations on us that are too high, but really leading someone toward Jesus in all of our leadership, authenticity, honesty, not to gain followers, but to serve. I said that my favorite leader, the one I look up to the most is my husband, Britt, and that's because I see that he is the same person at home as he is from the pulpit.
He's honest about his shortcomings. He truly seeks the Lord. That man has woken up at 4:00 AM to seek the Lord for as long as I've known him. He puts in the time with Jesus. He's honest about who he is and where he's at, and he loves people accordingly. And he is the same man at home as he is in public.
And I admire that more than any other trait in any leader, more than someone being [00:36:00] dynamic. showy or super talented. It's authenticity. Something I do currently to continue that culture of authenticity in my leadership is all those years ago when we left for Israel, I went off my social media. And I've never gone back on, so I don't have that platform.
But what I do have is a website where if anyone needs to get ahold of me and they're not in my direct community, and they email me on my website, I pray for every single person. I email them back. I often pray on email with that person, and it keeps it authentic because I know myself. I know that if I had a social media account, I would be pouring into that in a way that would be building my brand rather than building Jesus' brand.
As far as. Well, not that he needs his brand built , but I would be building my kingdom rather than his. I think I've, I've thought about it, I've prayed about it. I've talked to Britt about it. Should I go back on social media? Do I need to be an inspiration on that platform? What's the best way for me to use my time?
And ultimately, I realize my heart is just not pure enough. I would want the praise of men more than. Affirmation and it would be a trap for me. And I think that I can more better serve my people if it's a more intimate connection. And it's funny that we've gotten to this place and our culture where email is almost intimate, but it is.
And so that's how I serve my people, rather than being on social media where you can just leave a quick comment or some [00:38:00] emojis. , I will do an email exchange. I will pray, and it is a deeper, better way for me to serve the people who I lead. . It's funny. I feel like I'm an accidental pastor's wife. It's not something I asked for.
It's not something I prayed for. It was actually something that was not a welcome thing. But I look back over the 20 years and I think that I am the most blessed person to have gotten, to have all these relationships, to have met all these people, to have seen God work through all these people in this way.
As a pastor's wife and as a reluctant leader, and I think that's a safe place to stay in reluctant leading in a sense of if this is God's will, I will do it, but I don't wanna do it if my motivation. is not pure. If my motivation is to lift myself up, if it's to gain power over others, I think that's something that we need to run from.
But if your motivation is, Hey, God's put this, put me in this fear of influence and I'm gonna use it for him. So an accidental, reluctant pastor's wife, 20 years later is a grateful pastor's wife, a grateful author, and a grateful speaker.
I just wanted to be anywhere but in the hospital with a dying girl, and I was sitting in this chair, one of those gross hospital chairs looking out the window and scrolling through my Instagram on my phone, and I remember just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking at everyone else's lives. And everyone else was at the beach and everyone else was at a barbecue and everyone else's little girls had long [00:40:00] hair, and everyone seemed so happy and so free. And I was sitting in this hospital room with a dying girl who had lost all her hair, even her eyebrows and her eyelashes when she was weak and pale. And listless and I remember taking a picture and posting it to my Instagram and wanting everyone to feel sorry for me.
That was my motivation for posting that picture. And I said something about my view out the window from my room and my motivation was really self-pity and I, I was looking and I kept scrolling and then I felt, God, say "Kate, look up."
Steve Gatena: In part three of this three part series on Relentless Hope, Kate Merrick explains her decision to be present through the removal of social media from her life. The legacy we leave behind should lean into Jesus and commit ourselves to being available to others.
Kate Merrick: If there's one legacy I could leave to my children, my grandchildren, all the people I've ever mentored or spoken to or anyone who's ever read my books would be to learn to practice presence because I think of all the things that God has done in and through this silly surfer girl from California, and I think what it boils down to is learning to say, Yes.
It's leaning into what Jesus is doing in your life, and that really starts with being present. Right? And so I think, okay, 21 years ago, we leaned into what [00:42:00] God was saying to us. We were present with him. We said yes, and he built this church, this church with thousands of people getting saved on three separate continents.
And he, he's done things in and through me that I had no idea he would ever do. And it starts with being present. It starts with spending time with him because our life is not just the highlight reel, right? It's not. Uh, the sum of our tragedies or our best moments, but it's a collection of moments. It's every moment strung together, kind of like pearls on a necklace.
It's all the moments that we spend our time doing saying, being, breathing, praying. Are we gonna waste those moments? Are we going to numb out and check out and let them pass us by? Or are we gonna lean in moment by moment? And I remember the first time I really learned this lesson in a really, really hard way.
I had started by, you know, leaning into Jesus and learning that what it was to be present with him and, and listening to him and saying yes to planting a church and saying yes to, to all the things he wants to do with us. And then when cancer hit our lives, and, and Daisy girl was so sick, I learned, okay, you have a choice.
You can numb out and numb the pain and, and check out and be on your phone or, or choose, to just not be present in what it is or you can face it head on and, and I gotta be honest, it was, it was a lesson that was really, really, really hard to learn. And I remember one day we were at UCLA and we were harvesting Daisy's stem cells so that we could do some alternative treatment [00:44:00] with her blood.
And I remember we were in the hospital for a solid week and I was so, tired of being in the hospital. I was so tired of the sterile smells and the fluorescent lights, and I was so sick of looking out the window and seeing concrete, and I just wanted to be outside. I wanted to be at the beach. It was the summertime.
I just wanted to be anywhere but in the hospital with a dying girl. And I was sitting in this chair, one of those gross hospital chairs looking out the window and scrolling through my Instagram on my phone. And I remember just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking at everyone else's lives. And everyone else was at the beach and everyone else was at a barbecue.
And everyone else's little girls had long hair, and everyone seemed so happy and so free. And I was sitting in this hospital room with a dying girl who had lost all her hair, even her eyebrows and her eyelashes, and she was weak and pale and listless. And I remember taking a picture and posting it to my Instagram and wanting everyone to feel sorry for me.
That was my motivation for posting that picture. And I said something about my view. Out the window from my room and my motivation was really self pity. And I, I was looking and I kept scrolling and then I felt God, say, Kate, look up. Look up. And I remember looking up and looking across the room and I saw Daisy and I saw the freckles on her nose.
And I saw the sparkle in her eye even though she was so sick and [00:46:00] so sad, and I felt like God was saying, why are you missing out on what you have because of what you don't have? Look at what you have. She's still here. She's amazing and she loves you and wants to spend time with you. And I remember feeling so convicted.
About wanting what wasn't my life rather than leaning into my own actual life. And I set my phone down and I walked across the room and I climbed into that hospital bed with my daughter and we played cards and we watched cartoons, and she was funny and witty, and I was so grateful. To be in that room with her.
I was the only person in the world who got to be in a room with that girl at that time. And I learned the hard way. You have got to be present. You have got to be present in your life. You're gonna miss out. You're gonna miss out on all the beautiful things that God's given you. You're gonna miss out on what God wants to do in and through you, and you're gonna throw your life away.
And so we learned at that time, Hey, don't throw your life away. You be present. And it, it is not just you spend time with Jesus or you know, you turn off your phone, it's, hey, you have to have major courage to face what your life is sometimes, whether that is a sick child, whether that is, uh, infertility or dashed hopes, a divorce, whether you are fighting for social justice or freeing modern day slaves.
Whether you are in a tedious time of your life or a boring part of your life, or even when you're [00:48:00] in the sweetest part of your life. We have to choose to be present. We have to choose to lean into what God is doing right now, and that takes some courage. And part of that courage is saying no to something that is ripping you off.
And so I remember that day in the hospital at UCLA and it was a little bit before we were leaving for Israel and Britt and I, sat down and we said, okay, this is a time of our life where it's never gonna be this way again. We're never gonna go to a foreign country with our kids. We don't know how long we've got with Daisy.
What do we want this to look like? What, how do we wanna shape our time there? And we not only went off our social media, we left our smartphones in America. and we're like, okay, let's go. Let's leave it all behind. We're gonna email our families once a week and that's it. We are off the grid. And we leaned into that time when we were in Israel and it was awful and it was beautiful and it was all the things in between, but I learned...
that it's not just about not checking out, it's not just about looking your people in the eye, but it's about what God is doing in you. It's about Sabbath, it's about adventure. It's about food and life and all these beautiful things that God has given us. And if I can teach others to lean in to their family, to lean in.
If they have dying parents, if to lean in, if they have kids with disabilities or special needs to lean into the job. That is hard or it's hideous. God is doing something [00:50:00] in that time. And I remember backing up, I remember when Daisy was just born and Isaiah was only about three years old. And I was praying about what to do with my time.
Should I go back to work? Should I be a stay home mom? We have this new church. There's a lot of needs, and I was gonna pour myself into women's ministry because there were needs everywhere I looked. And so I'd been praying about that. And a friend of mine, a very prophetic friend of mine, said, I've been praying for you, and I don't think you're supposed to do women's ministry at this time.
I think you're supposed to stay home with your babies and pour into them everything that you can. She said, I dunno what it is, but I believe something's gonna happen around the time when your son is nine years old and they're gonna need everything you gave them. And you know, I just said, well, let me pray about that.
And it just rang true with me and I decided to let someone else do the women's ministry at church and I poured into my little kids and, and there were days where it was boring or you, I felt insignificant. I felt like I was wasting time or. Maybe it was so fun sometimes that I felt, well, I'm not doing anything important here.
I'm just having fun. Or, or all those feelings that stay home moms feel when they have little kids. But I parade with those kids every day. I, I read books with those kids every day. I kissed every skinned knee and I wiped every tear. And when Isaiah was nine years old, his sister was diagnosed with cancer and I knew that God had me, at home with those babies for such a time as this.
If I can spur my readers, my listeners, my people on to leaning into their life no matter [00:52:00] where they are, then I've left the legacy I wanna leave. If I can convince my children, my family, that God has more than we could ever imagine for us. Then I've done my job, I've left my legacy. If I can get through death and grief and lean into that pain and teach others, there is so much to be learned in pain, then I've done my job because there is so much vying for our attention, especially in 2019.
There is a million distractions. There are a million things coming at us. Look at me. Look at me. Buy this. Listen to this. So many things that would take us away from our real, actual, beautiful, painful life. And I don't want us to get to the end of it and think, oh, I wasted it. I wasted it on a screen. I wasted it on...
substance abuse. I wasted it on checking out and pretending that this wasn't my life. I think of Esther, queen Esther in the Bible, and I think of how she was faced with a really ugly situation. Esther was faced with government sanctioned human trafficking. I don't think that. her best life. I don't think that was what she was hoping her life would look like or dreaming of as a young Jewish girl.
And yet she finds herself taken from her home, put in a palace forever, because once you're there, you can't get [00:54:00] out. Once you sleep with the king, that's it. You're part of the harem. And I don't think as a young, lovely Jewish woman, Her desire was to sleep with an old pagan king. I just don't. And yet when she's there, we learn that she leaned into her awful situation.
She fasts and asks her maids to pray. Esther practiced some serious presence and rather than checking out and rather than just getting through her night with the king and then just living in the harem and not making a. Esther does what it takes. She studies, she figures out, who do I need to talk to?
What do I need to do to win this contest for queen? She leaned into her actual life. She leaned, she was present, she was brave, and Esther was incredibly fruitful. And we know this story. We know that she had to have major courage and she had to face the possibility of death. . So not only did she win the crown, but she was so brave so many times and she ends up saving an entire race of people from genocide.
That's a legacy. That is something I want for everyone I come in contact with. I want you to lean into your awful. I want you lean to lean into your beautiful. I want you to lean into your sad and your disappointing and say, God, what are you gonna do with me? What are you gonna do? That's the legacy I wanna leave.
Practicing presence, learning to be brave, and allowing God to be fruitful no matter what our actual life looks like. Because each one of us, no matter how seemingly insignificant our lives are, each life is meaningful. Each life has potential for God to use. God doesn't [00:56:00] use just the kings and the queens. God makes a lowly peasant girl, the mother of Messiah.
God turns a nice Jewish girl into a powerful Persian queen. God can do anything through any of us as long as we are willing, as long as we are leaning in and practicing presence in that way. And as I continue to lean into my own life and I continue to write books and speak and teach and pray, I just say, okay, Lord, what else are you gonna do?
And I love the, the idea that it doesn't stop with me. It doesn't stop with the churches we've planted or the books we've written or, or any of those things. It's, Hey, that's, that's just a catalyst, to keep on going for, for people to keep on sharing the gospel, for healing, to keep happening, for women to be set free and men to be set free.
That is just the catalyst to so many beautiful things that God can do, not just in and through me, but in and through every single person that I talk to, which in turn will do beautiful things. Every single person that they talk to is just this circle of life that God is so willing to give when we are so willing to lean into that.
And it starts with laying down to the distraction, listening to Jesus and saying, yes, God, I am in. I am in on this life that you gave me.
Steve Gatena: Thank you for listening to Pray.com's Relentless Hope podcast. I'm your host, Steve Gatena, and I'm here to help you love your life, lead with purpose, and leave a legacy of helping others. If you enjoyed this episode of [00:58:00] Pray.com's Relentless Hope podcast, be sure to share it with someone in your life. You never know the impact you can make on someone's life,
by sharing one piece of inspiring content. Until next time, always remember to give hope a voice.
Living Through the Loss of your Daughter - Kate Merrick
Steve Gatena: [00:00:00] Welcome to Pray.com's Relentless Hope, a podcast that'll help you love your life, lead with purpose, and leave a legacy of helping others. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I'm your host, Steve Gatena. Let's get started with today's episode of Relentless Hope
While searching for a final option to cure her daughter's cancer. Kate Merrick and her family found themselves in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Kate Merrick: The third week of September. The first year my daughter was in kindergarten. I was so excited to drop them off at school. My husband's a surfer. I'm a surfer. He is a pastor at that time, and pastor's day off is Monday, and so that's when we got to hang out, so we dropped our kids off at school.
And we turned around, went back down the freeway and we were hanging out, picking out surfboards at the factory, just living our best life. We're about to go surfing, and I get a phone call and it's a friend who works at my kid's school, and she said, Daisy fell down on the playground and she's hurt pretty bad.
You need to come and get her. So we turned the car back around, drove back up to Santa Barbara to pick our kids up or to pick Daisy. And when I go into the office, she's vomiting and she's because of the pain and she's in and out of consciousness, and so we think this isn't good. So we take her to the hospital and she's in the ICU for hours and hours.
By the end of the day, a nurse walks in and she's got a box of tissues and she's with an oncologist. And I knew I didn't know what an oncologist was or did, but I knew what the tissues were for.[00:02:00]
Steve Gatena: In part one of this three part series on Relentless Hope, Kate Merrick tells us how she became closer to God through the loss of her daughter Daisy. She understood how she was blessed by diving into God's word and learning from the women of the Bible.
Kate Merrick: I met Jesus when I was 19 years old. I was living a crazy lifestyle. I was partying and drugs and boys and everything that comes with it. And I had been dating this boy named Brit, and I remember one night we were at a party and he asked me if I wanted to go to a Bible study and I thought, oh yeah, I'm a Christian.
I'll go. I thought I knew, I thought I was a Christian. I thought I knew what it was to walk with Jesus, and I really had no idea. And so we go to this Bible study and as we open our Bibles and the word of God just comes alive, I was just blown out of the water. I thought, what? This is a good deal. Jesus loves me.
He wants to take these things that are hurting me and give me something better. And I was all in both feet just loving Jesus and. I'll tell this story in the leadership portion, but, uh, we end up loving Jesus and, and, you know, really walking away from a radical lifestyle and, and we end up serving God and, and we plant a church and we just have this blessed life.
We plant a church in Carpinteria. It's successful from the beginning. I'm married. I've got a wonderful, hardworking husband. I've got two beautiful kids. I. , uh, an eight year old son named Isaiah, a five-year-old daughter named Daisy. And we lived in a pretty little house, in a pretty little beach [00:04:00] town, and I was just so blessed and I thought, you know, God really loves me.
I'm really, really blessed this, this is a successful life. So my definition of blessed was basically the American dream the third week of September, the first. My daughter was in kindergarten. I was so excited to drop them off at school. My husband's a surfer. I'm a surfer. He is a pastor at that time, and pastor's day off is Monday.
And so that's when we got to hang out. So we dropped our kids off at school, we turned around, went back down the freeway, and we were hanging out, picking out surfboards at the factory, just living our best life, about to go surfing, and I get a phone. and it's a friend who works at my kid's school and she said, Daisy fell down on the playground and she's hurt pretty bad.
You need to come and get her. So we turned the car back around, drove back up to Santa Barbara to pick our kids up or to pick Daisy up. And when I go into the office, she's vomiting and she's because of the pain and she's in and out of consciousness, and so we think this isn't good. So we take her to the hospital and she's in the ICU for hours and hours.
By the end of the day, a nurse walks in and she's got a box of tissues and she's with an oncologist. And I knew, I didn't know what an oncologist was or did, but I knew what the tissues were for, and that doctor looked me in the face and said, Your daughter has cancer. There's a tumor the size of Nerf football growing in her belly, and we're gonna need to operate.
It's going to be a long, dangerous surgery. She's gonna need six weeks of radiation [00:06:00] and eight months of chemotherapy in my life turned upside down. All that blessing, all that shiny, happy, pretty Jesus loves me. I'm a good Christian. I'm blessed all that life, it just seemed to turn a hundred percent upside down.
So we spent 11 days in the hospital the first time we were there. And, and I remember coming home and just realizing this is my life now. And just not getting it. And we spent, you know, we had, we had faith, we prayed. It was hard. We would spend sometimes a month at a time in the hospital and Daisy would be getting treatment.
She lost all her. She lost a ton of weight. She was sick and frail. We had to be isolated from friends because we couldn't risk germs coming in the house. We had to miss out on all the fun things that everyone else was doing, all the, the blessed life that everyone else was living. It just wasn't part of our life.
And we were sad. We were isolated, we were lonely, we were hurting, and just watching my daughter be hurt over and over and over in all those months. So finally after eight months of chemotherapy, we finished treatment and they say, okay, we don't see any evidence of disease. But within four weeks we were back in the hospital with another tumor the size of a grapefruit.
And so that was what the next three years were like, just in and out of the hospital. The cancer could not be beat, it would not go away. And finally we ended up facing the doctors and they said there's nothing we can do for her. [00:08:00] She's exhausted every treatment we can think of in American pediatric oncology and.
Basically we can make her comfortable at this point. Well, that wasn't good enough for me. I thought, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna set it out. What can we do? How can we figure out a plan? Is there any alternative treatment? And at that time, we had a blog called Pray for Daisy, and it was huge. We had over a million unique visitors and hundreds of thousands of people were praying for.
and I thought, okay, we could do this. God is going to say yes to my prayer. He is going to answer my prayer. And we put out a message saying, okay, does anyone know of any alternative treatment we can do? And you know, we did everything for her. We anointed her with oil and we had the elders pray for her. , we got all kinds of suggestions.
We got some crazy suggestions of, well, if you drink this certain mushroom tea, or if you eat these weird nuts, or all kinds of crazy suggestions, and honestly, when you're about to lose your child, you're open to anything. But the best option we heard was there's a doctor in Tel Aviv, Israel, and he is doing experimental treatment.
and people are getting some success out there. So we decide, okay, that's our best chance to save Daisy's life. We are going to raise money and we are gonna get our family out there. And so we raise the money, we get ready, we do all the things we need to do to get. . When we take a look at each other and we decide, okay, we are gonna dive into the deep end here.
We're gonna go to Israel. We have no idea how long we're gonna be there, but we're gonna go off the grid and we're gonna just go deep. [00:10:00] And so we decide we're going off of our social media, we're gonna leave our iPhones in America and we're gonna tell our families, we will email you once a week. But other than.
we're just gonna go be present. We're gonna go be present with each other. We're gonna go be present with the Lord. We're gonna try and save Daisy's life. So we moved to Israel, the four of us, my son, my daughter, my husband, and me. And we just lean in. We lean into listening to the Lord, we lean into treatment.
We lean into, uh, the question of why. And honestly, we spent days on end. Begging God for healing and asking why. And I'd like to say that, you know, we were in the Holy Land and God spoke to us and it was so beautiful, but honestly we didn't hear much from him. We did not hear much from him, and I think now in hindsight, it's because we were asking the wrong question.
We were asking why, when we should have been asking who. And though he was silent when we were in Israel and giving us the answer to the question that we wanted, we knew he was with us and we could look back on the last three years and know and see he was with us in the. He was with us in treatment. He was with us when she was, well, he was with us when she was rediagnosed, and even though we didn't hear much from him, he was with us in Israel.
So after a few months in Israel, we can see that she's not getting much better and it's time to move back to America. So we pack up, we move back to America, and with a month within a month. She is diagnosed for the fourth and final [00:12:00] time with another tumor that has spread. And in the middle of the night she took her final breath in our arms, in our bedroom, and her spirit left her body and went to heaven, and we worshiped God who gives and takes away.
And we handed her body over to the men who show up in suits in the night to take away your loved one's body. And we set our final goodbyes to Daisy Love. And I just went dark. That question of why it came back up. Why, why, why did you take. I had faith. God, I had faith. We did all the things right. We were serving you.
We weren't living the lifestyle that we used to live. We got saved when we served you and we were telling people about you, and we were doing everything right. Why won't you bless me? Why won't you save her? I know you can. And so for the next. Three years after Daisy died, I had a lot to say to the Lord and I had a lot to hear from him.
And you know, one of the things he showed me is that he knows what it's like to experience an unanswered prayer, and that the night before Jesus was crucified, he himself asked. Please, please, please take this cup from me, but if not, your [00:14:00] will be done, not mine. And you know, honestly, I had been feeling like Jesus was kind of just up in heaven with his arms crossed like, yeah, stinks to be you, man.
Your kid died. That must hurt a. , but when I read the word, just like in the beginning when I read the the word and it became alive to me, I saw no, Jesus knows what it's like to experience pain and loss and suffering, and hunger and thirst and sadness, and anger. He knows what it's like. He has not left me alone to feel these things on my own.
And for the next couple of years, I, I just, I quit writing on the blog. I quit speaking. I just honed in and focused in on the Lord and what he had to teach me. And he showed me I was with you. I know what it's like. I feel your pain too. And then he also showed me that I had a hundred percent different definition of the word blessed than he.
Because I thought I was so blessed, right? We had a successful church, I had beautiful children. We lived in a pretty house. I had a great marriage and I thought, well, that's what being blessed is. I must be doing something right. God loves me. I'm obviously blessed, and God showed me through the word, there is a different definition for blessing, and he showed me through women of the Bible.
Sarah wife of Abraham, Bathsheba, but especially married, the mother of Jesus because Mary lived a radical life and what we see, what I saw in the word when he, when he [00:16:00] Abraham, Bathsheba, but especially married, and showing me these things is. The night that Gabriel told Mary she was gonna be mother of Messiah, he called her blessed among women.
He called her favored. And we read that scripture around east or around Christmas time, right? And we, we think, oh, Mary, she's, she's just, she's goals, right? She is hashtag goals. She's what we all wanna be. She's amazing. This is glamorous. She's mother of Messiah. She's got it all. She's in a really great spot here.
But what I see when I keep reading is something very different. This is what I see. I see a woman who wasn't welcome In Bethlehem, I see a woman who gave birth in a dirty cave. , I see a woman who became a refugee when her son was only just a baby. I see a woman who was mocked in her hometown because of her pregnancy, her, her son, and his supposed, um, status as Messiah.
I mean, who's gonna believe that? Who's gonna believe that? In fact, Joseph was gonna divorce her because he thought she was unfaithful. . And in those days, if you were unfaithful that you could, that was worthy of death. You could be stoned by your father or your fiance, and yet she's considered blessed and favored.
How is that blessed and favored? And not only was the beginning rough and Jesus' childhood rough losing him. in Jerusalem, at Passover, and all the things that come with this radical lifestyle. When his ministry on Earth was over, she watched her son be [00:18:00] tortured and killed in front of her very eyes. Is that blessed?
Is that blessing? because in my Western mind it, it makes no sense. That's, that's not blessing, but this is the word of God. This is the word of God that changed me in the beginning and I believe it and I trust it. And that changed everything for me, that made it for me to go from a place of deep bitterness and pain and questioning to a place of actual freedom and joy, and I.
I had a, I had a turnaround. It was okay, Lord, I was wrong. I didn't know what blessing meant. I didn't, I, I, I changed my perspective. It was, Lord, I'm gonna trust you. With this, and I'm gonna say that I am blessed to have had Daisy in my life for eight and a half years rather than, how come I didn't get her for longer than eight and a half years?
I'm gonna say, God, you are with me, and that is worth everything. I'm gonna say I believe you and trust you that things may be different than what they look on the surface. And ultimately it's the word of God, Jesus. The word made flesh That took me from a crazy heathen girl to planting churches, to having children, to giving one of my children over to heaven and burying her.
That has brought me from a place of bitterness and questioning. To a place of actual true joy. And there's so much freedom there to trust God because I believe that he loves Mary, mother of Jesus. After all, he chose her to birth the son of [00:20:00] God. And if I believe that he loves Mary, I can believe that he loves me and there is no greater freedom than walking.
In the deep love of Jesus and understanding that he suffers when we suffer and that he loves us with a love. So great, we can't even imagine. And so now, rather than asking why, why when tough stuff comes up, because it just keeps coming up . Nothing has been as hard as handing my baby girl over. But instead of asking why, I know I've learned.
You ask who, who? How am I gonna see you in this? What are you gonna do in this? How can I trust you in this? What are you gonna speak to me in this situation? And we don't have to be afraid of suffering anymore. I mean, it's awful. It's hard, but it's not uncommon to the human experience. Every Bible hero we know.
Has suffered and has sinned, and we would do well to learn from their examples and to realize we need to get a different definition of blessing than the one that our cul, our culture tells us. Because if we're hanging on so tightly to the life that we think is ours, the life we think we want, we would do well to be open-handed with Jesus and say, you know you can do this.
What you. And I trust you in this. God can do anything. And he took this girl from deep, deep pain and bitterness to true joy and true freedom.
And I think [00:22:00] that's where we can. The people that we lead is in grace, grace, grace, over and over, grace, never placing too high of an expectation on our people. Just like we don't want people to place expectations on us that are too high, but really leading someone toward Jesus in all of our leadership, authenticity, honesty, not to gain followers, but to serve.
I said that my favorite leader, the one I look up to the most is my husband, Britt, and that's because I see that he is the same person at home as he is from the pulpit. He's honest about his shortcomings. He truly seeks the Lord. That man has woken up at 4:00 AM to seek the Lord for as long as I've known him.
He puts in the time with Jesus. He's honest about who he is and where he's at, and he loves people accordingly. And he is the same man at home as he is in public. And I admire that more than any other trait in any leader, more than someone being dynamic or showy or super talented, it's authenticity.
Steve Gatena: In part two of this three part series on Relentless Hope, Kate Merrick tells us about the influence her husband Britt had on her life as a role model through being a leader at a college youth group to planting churches around the world. Kate learned that leadership is done through authenticity and selfless service to those around you.
Kate Merrick: I feel like leadership snuck up on me. , after I had gone to that Bible study with my boyfriend at the time, now husband, we [00:24:00] just decided that Jesus was so amazing we could not stop talking about him. And so I remember the first time we told someone about Jesus, we were at a surf contest and my husband was coaching the surfers at the time, and we were reading our Bibles on.
And this kid came up to us and said, Hey, what are you guys reading? And we said, the Bible. And he goes, what's the Bible? And we were like, what? What's the Bible? And we just, we told him everything from Genesis to Revelation. I remember for five hours straight, we were telling this kid all about Jesus and all about the word of God.
And the Lord spoke to us and said, Hey, there are kids here who don't know me and they need to know me. Will you tell. And so we decided that going around telling kids about Jesus was good, but hey, let's have a Bible study at your parents' house. So I would make cookies and brownies to get the kids there, and Brit would teach through the Bible and the kids showed up and they were getting saved and baptized, and.
We were given up bibles and it was radical. And, and, uh, right after we got married in 1998, the pastor at our church where we were going, said, will you take over the college ministry? And at that time, We had just gotten married and it just seemed like a crazy thing. Like what? That's crazy. And God told us both, you need to say yes to this.
And so we said yes. And I remember the first Friday night, there were eight kids there, and within the next year there were, 800 kids. God was blessing it. And it was just the pure word of God. You show up, we're gonna, we're gonna tell you the truth, we're gonna give you the Bible, we're gonna worship God.
And those days I, I look back with such nostalgia. . I would work all day at my job at the [00:26:00] surf shop and then we'd set up the chairs and I'd bring snacks and when it got too big to, to feed everyone snacks, I would, I would clean up the chairs and I would clean up trash at midnight. I mean, we would worship the Lord and.
pray together all the things until midnight. And then I got pregnant with my first son, and I just remember being eight months pregnant and picking candy wrappers up off the ground and just serving and serving and serving. And I loved it. I loved it. There were kids at our house all the time. college kids.
There would be someone sleeping on our couch, someone sleeping on our floor. Someone would come and just stay a week and not go home. And it just, it kind of leadership just took us by surprise. Next thing you know, we've got 900 college kids who come every week. We're leading a, we're leading a, a group of other leaders.
We're mentoring kids. We're meeting one-on-one, and, it just snuck up on us. Six years into that, the Lord says to us that he wants us to plant a church. And we thought, okay, this is weird because, you know, we'd always thought, well, we'll do this college gig until, you know, maybe till we have kids or, you know, but we're, we're, we're in the surf industry here.
My husband's family owned Channel Islands Surfboards at the time, and my husband. Shaping and designing surfboards. And I was working at the retail store and the plan was that he would take over the wholesale business and I would take over the retail business, but God had a different plan for us. He said, Nope, you're actually going to plant churches.
And it was crazy. And I remember just knowing without a shadow of the doubt, this is what God has for. So we had to talk to his parents and [00:28:00] say, God is leading us in a different direction. This is kind of what we feel he's asking us to do. And his parents love the Lord. And they said, yep, I think you're right.
And next thing you know, we've got this baby church. So we plant this baby church and the Lord is all over it. Our first Sunday, 500 people. And not only do we have this church, but within a few years we start birthing churches from our church. And so today in 2019, there are nine of us. We're called Reality, and the first one is at reality carpentry, and that's where we currently serve.
And. Leadership, I say just absolutely snuck up on us because we just kept meeting a need. We kept meeting a need. Whether that need was these surfers at the beach need to know about God, or these college kids need prayer. These college kids need someone, you know, to listen to them, to rebuke them, to feed them.
Leadership is all about service. And I remember the first time I really got an earful about it. Um, I, I showed up at church one day and there were all these college kids hanging around my husband's office and I remember thinking, ah, you have work to do. What are all these kids doing? They're taking up your time and your space.
And I pull my husband aside and I say, do you want me to get rid of these guys? Do you want me to tell them to go? And he said, this is true discipleship. This is what Jesus does. This is what leadership is. It's knowing people and making yourself known. It's not standing on a stage and you know, delivering a flawless sermon.
It's not having all the spotlight, spotlight on you. [00:30:00] It's meeting a need whether its, making brownies for kids to get them to come to Bible study or if it's spending time just hanging out with college guys. And so I would say that the leader I look up to most is my husband, Britt, because he has shown me what it looks like to be an authentic leader, what it looks like to serve.
At church, there is no mess. He's not willing to clean up. There is no person he's not willing to pray for. Leadership is service, and I think about Jesus and how he washed his disciples feet. I mean, this is God made flesh. Jesus girding himself with a towel and washing the dirty feet of his disciples, and not just the disciples that he liked the best, but the one who betrayed him, right?
Like the annoying ones or the crazy ones, or the zealous ones. Jesus is the ultimate servant, and that's who we learn leadership from. It's not to be seen, but it's to. And it's not just to be known as far as what your name is or what you're saying from the stage, but to be truly known and to let your heart be open, to be authentic in the way that you love others.
And these days, leadership looks a little different for me. We're not doing college ministry anymore. We lead a. . I lead a group of women online with my writing. I write books. I speak at retreats and conferences, and so leadership has a little different of a look for me these days, but the principles are the same if [00:32:00] I speak in such a way to get someone to notice.
then I'm not serving them well. If I can't be authentic in who I am and in where I've been, I'm not serving someone well. If I can't be honest about my failures and my sins and where I've come from. I'm not serving people well. Leadership is not about gaining followers. Leadership is not about like and subscribe and.
You know, admire you. It's not about getting comments on your social media. That's not leadership. Leadership is service. Leadership is inviting people into your space. I remember I used to teach a cooking class for the college girls, and I taught them how to make rice and beans and enchiladas, and it's bringing them into your home and not worrying about if it's fancy or how you seem.
Putting your arms around someone no matter where they're at and saying, girl, I love you. You just look like you needed a hug. Leadership says, I see you. I love you. And sometimes even me too, leadership doesn't act like we've never sinned or we don't struggle with the same things our people struggle with.
But leadership is authentic and honest. , but the most important thing about leadership is that true leadership and true ministry flows from intimacy, and that means intimacy with Jesus. If we cannot carry a true, authentic relationship with the Lord, we cannot lead other people well, whether that's in my writing or in my speaking.
If I'm not spending time with God, then what I [00:34:00] write. , it probably doesn't have a whole lot of value if what I'm writing is not from the motivation of what does Jesus have for this person. It's not gonna hold a lot of value. And so ultimately we wanna lead people to Jesus rather than leading them to us.
One of my favorite ways to lead and be. Is through grace and I think about the grace that Jesus had with the people that he led and how often his disciples would speak out wrongly or or freak out and, and he would put them in their place, but he always had grace. And I think that's where we can meet the people that we lead, is in grace, grace, grace, over and over, grace.
Never placing too high of an expectation on our people. Just like we don't want people to place expectations on us that are too high, but really leading someone toward Jesus in all of our leadership, authenticity, honesty, not to gain followers, but to serve. I said that my favorite leader, the one I look up to the most is my husband, Britt, and that's because I see that he is the same person at home as he is from the pulpit.
He's honest about his shortcomings. He truly seeks the Lord. That man has woken up at 4:00 AM to seek the Lord for as long as I've known him. He puts in the time with Jesus. He's honest about who he is and where he's at, and he loves people accordingly. And he is the same man at home as he is in public.
And I admire that more than any other trait in any leader, more than someone being [00:36:00] dynamic. showy or super talented. It's authenticity. Something I do currently to continue that culture of authenticity in my leadership is all those years ago when we left for Israel, I went off my social media. And I've never gone back on, so I don't have that platform.
But what I do have is a website where if anyone needs to get ahold of me and they're not in my direct community, and they email me on my website, I pray for every single person. I email them back. I often pray on email with that person, and it keeps it authentic because I know myself. I know that if I had a social media account, I would be pouring into that in a way that would be building my brand rather than building Jesus' brand.
As far as. Well, not that he needs his brand built , but I would be building my kingdom rather than his. I think I've, I've thought about it, I've prayed about it. I've talked to Britt about it. Should I go back on social media? Do I need to be an inspiration on that platform? What's the best way for me to use my time?
And ultimately, I realize my heart is just not pure enough. I would want the praise of men more than. Affirmation and it would be a trap for me. And I think that I can more better serve my people if it's a more intimate connection. And it's funny that we've gotten to this place and our culture where email is almost intimate, but it is.
And so that's how I serve my people, rather than being on social media where you can just leave a quick comment or some [00:38:00] emojis. , I will do an email exchange. I will pray, and it is a deeper, better way for me to serve the people who I lead. . It's funny. I feel like I'm an accidental pastor's wife. It's not something I asked for.
It's not something I prayed for. It was actually something that was not a welcome thing. But I look back over the 20 years and I think that I am the most blessed person to have gotten, to have all these relationships, to have met all these people, to have seen God work through all these people in this way.
As a pastor's wife and as a reluctant leader, and I think that's a safe place to stay in reluctant leading in a sense of if this is God's will, I will do it, but I don't wanna do it if my motivation. is not pure. If my motivation is to lift myself up, if it's to gain power over others, I think that's something that we need to run from.
But if your motivation is, Hey, God's put this, put me in this fear of influence and I'm gonna use it for him. So an accidental, reluctant pastor's wife, 20 years later is a grateful pastor's wife, a grateful author, and a grateful speaker.
I just wanted to be anywhere but in the hospital with a dying girl, and I was sitting in this chair, one of those gross hospital chairs looking out the window and scrolling through my Instagram on my phone, and I remember just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking at everyone else's lives. And everyone else was at the beach and everyone else was at a barbecue and everyone else's little girls had long [00:40:00] hair, and everyone seemed so happy and so free. And I was sitting in this hospital room with a dying girl who had lost all her hair, even her eyebrows and her eyelashes when she was weak and pale. And listless and I remember taking a picture and posting it to my Instagram and wanting everyone to feel sorry for me.
That was my motivation for posting that picture. And I said something about my view out the window from my room and my motivation was really self-pity and I, I was looking and I kept scrolling and then I felt, God, say "Kate, look up."
Steve Gatena: In part three of this three part series on Relentless Hope, Kate Merrick explains her decision to be present through the removal of social media from her life. The legacy we leave behind should lean into Jesus and commit ourselves to being available to others.
Kate Merrick: If there's one legacy I could leave to my children, my grandchildren, all the people I've ever mentored or spoken to or anyone who's ever read my books would be to learn to practice presence because I think of all the things that God has done in and through this silly surfer girl from California, and I think what it boils down to is learning to say, Yes.
It's leaning into what Jesus is doing in your life, and that really starts with being present. Right? And so I think, okay, 21 years ago, we leaned into what [00:42:00] God was saying to us. We were present with him. We said yes, and he built this church, this church with thousands of people getting saved on three separate continents.
And he, he's done things in and through me that I had no idea he would ever do. And it starts with being present. It starts with spending time with him because our life is not just the highlight reel, right? It's not. Uh, the sum of our tragedies or our best moments, but it's a collection of moments. It's every moment strung together, kind of like pearls on a necklace.
It's all the moments that we spend our time doing saying, being, breathing, praying. Are we gonna waste those moments? Are we going to numb out and check out and let them pass us by? Or are we gonna lean in moment by moment? And I remember the first time I really learned this lesson in a really, really hard way.
I had started by, you know, leaning into Jesus and learning that what it was to be present with him and, and listening to him and saying yes to planting a church and saying yes to, to all the things he wants to do with us. And then when cancer hit our lives, and, and Daisy girl was so sick, I learned, okay, you have a choice.
You can numb out and numb the pain and, and check out and be on your phone or, or choose, to just not be present in what it is or you can face it head on and, and I gotta be honest, it was, it was a lesson that was really, really, really hard to learn. And I remember one day we were at UCLA and we were harvesting Daisy's stem cells so that we could do some alternative treatment [00:44:00] with her blood.
And I remember we were in the hospital for a solid week and I was so, tired of being in the hospital. I was so tired of the sterile smells and the fluorescent lights, and I was so sick of looking out the window and seeing concrete, and I just wanted to be outside. I wanted to be at the beach. It was the summertime.
I just wanted to be anywhere but in the hospital with a dying girl. And I was sitting in this chair, one of those gross hospital chairs looking out the window and scrolling through my Instagram on my phone. And I remember just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking at everyone else's lives. And everyone else was at the beach and everyone else was at a barbecue.
And everyone else's little girls had long hair, and everyone seemed so happy and so free. And I was sitting in this hospital room with a dying girl who had lost all her hair, even her eyebrows and her eyelashes, and she was weak and pale and listless. And I remember taking a picture and posting it to my Instagram and wanting everyone to feel sorry for me.
That was my motivation for posting that picture. And I said something about my view. Out the window from my room and my motivation was really self pity. And I, I was looking and I kept scrolling and then I felt God, say, Kate, look up. Look up. And I remember looking up and looking across the room and I saw Daisy and I saw the freckles on her nose.
And I saw the sparkle in her eye even though she was so sick and [00:46:00] so sad, and I felt like God was saying, why are you missing out on what you have because of what you don't have? Look at what you have. She's still here. She's amazing and she loves you and wants to spend time with you. And I remember feeling so convicted.
About wanting what wasn't my life rather than leaning into my own actual life. And I set my phone down and I walked across the room and I climbed into that hospital bed with my daughter and we played cards and we watched cartoons, and she was funny and witty, and I was so grateful. To be in that room with her.
I was the only person in the world who got to be in a room with that girl at that time. And I learned the hard way. You have got to be present. You have got to be present in your life. You're gonna miss out. You're gonna miss out on all the beautiful things that God's given you. You're gonna miss out on what God wants to do in and through you, and you're gonna throw your life away.
And so we learned at that time, Hey, don't throw your life away. You be present. And it, it is not just you spend time with Jesus or you know, you turn off your phone, it's, hey, you have to have major courage to face what your life is sometimes, whether that is a sick child, whether that is, uh, infertility or dashed hopes, a divorce, whether you are fighting for social justice or freeing modern day slaves.
Whether you are in a tedious time of your life or a boring part of your life, or even when you're [00:48:00] in the sweetest part of your life. We have to choose to be present. We have to choose to lean into what God is doing right now, and that takes some courage. And part of that courage is saying no to something that is ripping you off.
And so I remember that day in the hospital at UCLA and it was a little bit before we were leaving for Israel and Britt and I, sat down and we said, okay, this is a time of our life where it's never gonna be this way again. We're never gonna go to a foreign country with our kids. We don't know how long we've got with Daisy.
What do we want this to look like? What, how do we wanna shape our time there? And we not only went off our social media, we left our smartphones in America. and we're like, okay, let's go. Let's leave it all behind. We're gonna email our families once a week and that's it. We are off the grid. And we leaned into that time when we were in Israel and it was awful and it was beautiful and it was all the things in between, but I learned...
that it's not just about not checking out, it's not just about looking your people in the eye, but it's about what God is doing in you. It's about Sabbath, it's about adventure. It's about food and life and all these beautiful things that God has given us. And if I can teach others to lean in to their family, to lean in.
If they have dying parents, if to lean in, if they have kids with disabilities or special needs to lean into the job. That is hard or it's hideous. God is doing something [00:50:00] in that time. And I remember backing up, I remember when Daisy was just born and Isaiah was only about three years old. And I was praying about what to do with my time.
Should I go back to work? Should I be a stay home mom? We have this new church. There's a lot of needs, and I was gonna pour myself into women's ministry because there were needs everywhere I looked. And so I'd been praying about that. And a friend of mine, a very prophetic friend of mine, said, I've been praying for you, and I don't think you're supposed to do women's ministry at this time.
I think you're supposed to stay home with your babies and pour into them everything that you can. She said, I dunno what it is, but I believe something's gonna happen around the time when your son is nine years old and they're gonna need everything you gave them. And you know, I just said, well, let me pray about that.
And it just rang true with me and I decided to let someone else do the women's ministry at church and I poured into my little kids and, and there were days where it was boring or you, I felt insignificant. I felt like I was wasting time or. Maybe it was so fun sometimes that I felt, well, I'm not doing anything important here.
I'm just having fun. Or, or all those feelings that stay home moms feel when they have little kids. But I parade with those kids every day. I, I read books with those kids every day. I kissed every skinned knee and I wiped every tear. And when Isaiah was nine years old, his sister was diagnosed with cancer and I knew that God had me, at home with those babies for such a time as this.
If I can spur my readers, my listeners, my people on to leaning into their life no matter [00:52:00] where they are, then I've left the legacy I wanna leave. If I can convince my children, my family, that God has more than we could ever imagine for us. Then I've done my job, I've left my legacy. If I can get through death and grief and lean into that pain and teach others, there is so much to be learned in pain, then I've done my job because there is so much vying for our attention, especially in 2019.
There is a million distractions. There are a million things coming at us. Look at me. Look at me. Buy this. Listen to this. So many things that would take us away from our real, actual, beautiful, painful life. And I don't want us to get to the end of it and think, oh, I wasted it. I wasted it on a screen. I wasted it on...
substance abuse. I wasted it on checking out and pretending that this wasn't my life. I think of Esther, queen Esther in the Bible, and I think of how she was faced with a really ugly situation. Esther was faced with government sanctioned human trafficking. I don't think that. her best life. I don't think that was what she was hoping her life would look like or dreaming of as a young Jewish girl.
And yet she finds herself taken from her home, put in a palace forever, because once you're there, you can't get [00:54:00] out. Once you sleep with the king, that's it. You're part of the harem. And I don't think as a young, lovely Jewish woman, Her desire was to sleep with an old pagan king. I just don't. And yet when she's there, we learn that she leaned into her awful situation.
She fasts and asks her maids to pray. Esther practiced some serious presence and rather than checking out and rather than just getting through her night with the king and then just living in the harem and not making a. Esther does what it takes. She studies, she figures out, who do I need to talk to?
What do I need to do to win this contest for queen? She leaned into her actual life. She leaned, she was present, she was brave, and Esther was incredibly fruitful. And we know this story. We know that she had to have major courage and she had to face the possibility of death. . So not only did she win the crown, but she was so brave so many times and she ends up saving an entire race of people from genocide.
That's a legacy. That is something I want for everyone I come in contact with. I want you to lean into your awful. I want you lean to lean into your beautiful. I want you to lean into your sad and your disappointing and say, God, what are you gonna do with me? What are you gonna do? That's the legacy I wanna leave.
Practicing presence, learning to be brave, and allowing God to be fruitful no matter what our actual life looks like. Because each one of us, no matter how seemingly insignificant our lives are, each life is meaningful. Each life has potential for God to use. God doesn't [00:56:00] use just the kings and the queens. God makes a lowly peasant girl, the mother of Messiah.
God turns a nice Jewish girl into a powerful Persian queen. God can do anything through any of us as long as we are willing, as long as we are leaning in and practicing presence in that way. And as I continue to lean into my own life and I continue to write books and speak and teach and pray, I just say, okay, Lord, what else are you gonna do?
And I love the, the idea that it doesn't stop with me. It doesn't stop with the churches we've planted or the books we've written or, or any of those things. It's, Hey, that's, that's just a catalyst, to keep on going for, for people to keep on sharing the gospel, for healing, to keep happening, for women to be set free and men to be set free.
That is just the catalyst to so many beautiful things that God can do, not just in and through me, but in and through every single person that I talk to, which in turn will do beautiful things. Every single person that they talk to is just this circle of life that God is so willing to give when we are so willing to lean into that.
And it starts with laying down to the distraction, listening to Jesus and saying, yes, God, I am in. I am in on this life that you gave me.
Steve Gatena: Thank you for listening to Pray.com's Relentless Hope podcast. I'm your host, Steve Gatena, and I'm here to help you love your life, lead with purpose, and leave a legacy of helping others. If you enjoyed this episode of [00:58:00] Pray.com's Relentless Hope podcast, be sure to share it with someone in your life. You never know the impact you can make on someone's life,
by sharing one piece of inspiring content. Until next time, always remember to give hope a voice.
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