Brave Surrender Read online

  Other friends found me after church to describe, with similar intensity, the impact the album was having on them. Person after person said they could feel God’s tangible love filling the room and shaking them to the core. Some had cried for days as God delivered them from shame. They were experiencing freedom as old mind-sets suddenly shifted and negative thoughts and lies were replaced with truth, love, joy, and peace. Where a weight or a burden had been holding them down, now they felt lightheartedness and a deeper trust in Jesus.

  Soon, random strangers at church began stopping to tell me the same thing, their voices full of passion as they described the love they had encountered. The majority of them mentioned that the part where I was speaking was especially powerful.

  I couldn’t help but continue to be baffled that these were the testimonies coming out of that crazy moment. Yes, I was glad that people were encountering God’s love—that was exactly what I had hoped and prayed for. Yet no matter how many times I thought about (or worse, heard) that moment on the album, I felt nothing but embarrassment and a hope that people would soon delete the song from their playlists.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen next.

  A month or two after the release of We Cry Out, my younger brother, Matt, who was about fifteen years old at the time, called me. “Kim,” he said excitedly, “you’re on YouTube!”

  “What is YouTube?” I asked, bewildered.

  He told me to get online and guided me to a web page where I saw the video of me singing “How He Loves.” My stomach dropped to the floor, and embarrassment flooded through me once again. NO WAY. This vulnerable moment of mine was floating around in cyberspace for the whole world to see? I was suddenly possessed by the urge to mysteriously disappear from planet Earth.

  Then I saw the number posted below the video: 20,347.

  “Matt,” I shouted through the phone, “what is this number underneath the video?”

  “That’s the number of views this video has had.”

  Kill me, I thought. I’m dead. I have to change my name.

  That number was ringing through my head. I got off the phone and immediately called Banning.

  “Banning,” I shrieked. “I’m dying!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Did you know that someone put ‘How He Loves’ on this thing called YouTube, and it’s been seen more than twenty thousand times?” My voice rose to a scream.

  “Yes!” Banning exclaimed excitedly. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  I was speechless. I could only think that I was living in some alternate universe where your worst nightmares not only become reality but are then broadcast across the internet. As I was pondering the cost of a new identity, I heard Banning say, “We’re working to get it taken down, but then we’ll put it right back up again so it’s there legally.”

  Oh great, I thought. As he had for the umpteenth time by now, Banning tried to calm me down and assure me that the video was a powerful moment and that God was up to something spectacular here. Despite the positive feedback we had gotten so far, however, I was sure Banning was being way too optimistic.

  I drove home from work that day, went straight to my room, and lay down on my bed. My heart was pounding, and tears stung my eyes. I just could not believe what was happening. Thousands of people had seen me in a moment I wished I could have erased from history. Many had watched that moment over and over. Instead of fading from the scene, “How He Loves” was on its way to massive exposure—and so was I. That meant I was either facing embarrassment of epic proportions—or . . .

  Or God had a plan.

  I began to feel the gentle presence of Jesus surrounding me as I lay on my bed. I could feel the love of my Father—a love I have come to know very well—filling up my insides and causing the wind and the waves of my stormy emotions to calm.

  After a few moments of simply receiving His love and peace, I sensed the Holy Spirit gently beginning to help me understand how I had come to be in this place. He first reminded me of a prayer I had prayed many times. I had prayed it long before I ever heard John Mark’s beautiful song. I had prayed it in desperation: God, help me to love like You love.

  This prayer had been born out of a journey of healing I had walked through several years earlier. As you’ll learn in the coming chapters, things I had experienced in my childhood had led me to become a woman full of wounds, scars, pain, anger, fear, hatred, and deep sorrow. Finally, through God’s insistent wooing in my life, I reached the place where I was desperate to be free. I became convinced that if I could come to know His love in a radical way and see my life through His eyes, then I would view my past and those who brought me pain through the lens of that love. Surely, that was the way I could forgive them, love them, and love myself, for “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

  Sure enough, all of that turned out to be true. God had met me with His love in a series of profound healing encounters that utterly transformed me. On the other side of those encounters, all I wanted was to live in that love and share it with others. My daily prayer became, “God, help me to love like You love.” His presence became the air I breathed. I could feel His heart for people in a way I never had before. I could feel the heart of a Father calling out to His prodigal child to come home. I could feel the heart of a Mother, a love that never, ever gives up on her child and always believes the best. I could feel the heart of a Brother, who swears, “Come hell or high water, I will not forsake you.”

  It was this love I had felt when I first heard “How He Loves.” That experience hadn’t just been about me receiving love from Jesus; it had been about me being consumed by the desire to help others receive it. This was why I had said, “Pick me!” And even though my version of the song hadn’t gone the way I had envisioned, I had to admit that the results I was seeing were exactly what I had wanted. People were receiving God’s love.

  More peace flooded through me as I lay on my bed and finally understood that God had had a plan all along. That plan had started before the recording, before I heard the song, before my healing, and even before the song was written. It was not about me. It didn’t matter that I was embarrassed or felt foolish. It didn’t matter that I was terrified of what people thought. The only thing that mattered was a Father wanting more than anything for His children to know His love for them.

  But it was about me in one sense, I realized. This was another opportunity for me to surrender.

  Before my healing encounters with the love of God, I knew that I needed His love and that His love would transform me. What I didn’t know was that letting God love me would require me to make one of the riskiest and most vulnerable and courageous decisions I had ever made—the decision to surrender. I had to let Him love me on His terms, and that meant letting go of the questions, demands, and needs I had been insisting He address. It would be a long journey of learning ahead.

  Now I was in another moment where I needed to surrender. I had to let go of the way I wished that vulnerable moment on stage had gone. I didn’t get to bury it or go back and turn it into something polished and articulate. I had to let it be what it was and let God use it the way He wanted to.

  Brave Enough to Surrender

  Over the last ten years, I’ve had to continue to surrender that moment to the Lord. I know it’s probably surprising to everyone but me, but to this day, I still have times when I wish I could have convinced Banning to switch out the live track of “How He Loves” with a perfectly produced studio version featuring no talking, and to leave the video off We Cry Out entirely. That would have saved me from experiences I could have lived without—like event chauffeurs loudly quoting my entire speech from the song while taking me to a concert venue or reluctantly listening as random people at the grocery store want to quote it to me, complete with hand motions.

  Yet I am also fully aware of the reality that this recording is the catalyst God has used to bring me to where I am today and to bring countless people in
to transforming encounters with Him. It has arguably been the recording that brought significant exposure to Jesus Culture and helped launch it into the movement it has become.

  Today, that YouTube video has more than 20 million views. For ten years, I have received a regular stream of emails and social media comments from people who are watching it for the first time, letting me know about how Jesus is showing them His love. It would take another book to record all the stories and testimonies of what a single moment caught on a recording has meant to so many, but I’ll mention just a few.

  One email came from a woman who told me she was in a lesbian relationship. Someone had emailed her the link to the video. After she watched it, she kept playing it over and over. She couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus. In her email, she asked me if I thought Jesus could possibly love her in the way I was singing about. It wrecked me. I was happy to share the love of God with her.

  I have received multiple emails from mothers who sent the video to their teenage children who had wandered from the Lord. They each reported that their kids had ended up in a sobbing heap on the floor, experiencing the love of a Father for the first time.

  The parents of a very young boy who was battling cancer in a Ronald McDonald House in San Francisco wrote to tell me that their son’s favorite song was “How He Loves.” He asked his mom to play it over and over. My husband and I went to visit him. I sang the song to him and watched as pure joy and peace came over his face and his parents’ faces. He went to live with Jesus a few weeks after that.

  The more I have seen the way God has used and continues to use this song to bring people into an encounter with His love, the more I have gained His perspective on it. I now know that God hasn’t used it in spite of my raw, awkward vulnerability but because of it. When I push my embarrassed feelings aside and look at what actually happened in that moment, I see my true self—a woman who has been radically transformed by encountering God’s love and who lives to invite others into the same experience.

  There was no way I could hide, control, or perfect the way I expressed my hunger for people to know God’s love in that moment. It was raw, but most important, it was real. And only because this was the true, deep cry of my heart could it resonate with the heart cries of those who heard it and immediately knew, “Yes, that is what I want to say!” As those genuine cries rose to heaven, Jesus responded from His heart for us.

  In that awkward moment in the middle of the song, I said, “We’re never the same after we’ve encountered the love of God.” It is very common for a Christian to say that Jesus loves them. We learn this in Sunday school. We sing about it in our songs. We memorize it in Scripture. But until we experience this truth in a tangible way, it won’t become a deep conviction we live by. My husband can tell me he loves me all day long, but unless he actually puts those words into action and shows me his love for me, it’s hard to believe and even harder to respond to.

  I know that Jesus loves me because I have felt it, heard it, and seen it with my own eyes. It is that experience of His love that provokes radical change in me. And ever since I’ve encountered His love, this is the conviction that drives my worship: I don’t want to just say that Jesus loves me; I want to know it deep down inside and be changed by it.

  If you’ve ever encountered the love of God, then you already know what I’ve discovered: a love encounter, by its very nature, only happens through a courageous and vulnerable act of surrender. To receive God’s love, we must let Him love us. We must abandon every effort to keep Him at a distance or every effort to control the way He touches and transforms us. We have to let Him come close—into the deepest parts of who we are—and change everything with His love.

  I’m convinced there can be no relationship with Him without this brave surrender. Sometimes I feel like a broken record—constantly encouraging people to surrender their lives, lay down their questions and accusations, and let down their walls. I look for many ways to tell people what I desperately do not want them to miss: God loves you so much, and when you experience that, you will never be the same.

  I tell them that I know what it’s like to struggle to trust Jesus when bad things happen—to let go of all the pain and fear, the unanswered questions, and the powerful urge to be in control, and to let God be God in their lives. And I tell them who I’ve discovered this God to be—a Father who loves with a love that can’t be earned, never gives up, and meets us right where we are, no matter the mess or the storm in which we find ourselves. With everything in me, I try to give them the courage to fall into His arms.

  But of course, I can only tell people so much in one worship set, conference session talk, or interview. This is why I’ve decided to tell the whole story of how I have come to know these things about God’s love. I’ve decided to step into another moment of raw vulnerability and invite you, and anyone who reads this book, to share it with me—all because I want you to believe me and to believe Him. He loves you with a love that cannot be measured, stopped, or contained!

  Chapter 2

  SAFETY SHATTERED

  If there’s one thing I know without question, it’s that one moment can change your whole life. Just as there are moments that heal, restore, and revive, there are also moments that shatter, wound, and destroy.

  The first of these shattering moments in my life occurred when I was two years old. My dad was riding his motorcycle home one day when a woman in a car ran a stop sign at an intersection and struck him. He flew through the air and hit his head on the pavement very hard (he wasn’t wearing a helmet). At the hospital, the doctors told my mom he had sustained a very serious brain injury and was in a coma. They couldn’t be sure he would wake up, and if he did, he was unlikely to regain full functionality.

  My mom took me to visit my dad at the hospital. Having no concept that he was unconscious, I began talking to him. I’m sure it was mostly baby gibberish, but I don’t doubt for a second that I talked a lot (a trait I still possess). As I began talking, his body began to move, as though he was responding to the sound of my voice. The doctors were intrigued by this and told my mom to bring me around more in case the sound of my voice might call him back to consciousness.

  Much to the doctors’ surprise, after ten days in a coma, my dad woke up. Even more amazingly, he learned to walk and talk again. It wasn’t easy, but with a lot of therapy, he got there. However, those weren’t the only difficulties he had to overcome. When a person suffers a brain injury that severe, there are levels of healing the brain goes through as it learns to function again. His speech was a little different; his memory really suffered; and he struggled to do simple tasks, like pour himself a glass of iced tea. He had moments of rage and sporadic yelling, as well as moments when he acted silly and childlike—all typical stages, we learned, of his brain trying to get its wires firing somewhat normally.

  As a little girl, I could never understand why my parents divorced two years after the accident. Now as an adult, I can imagine what a strain it must have been on their marriage. They were both young. My mom was twenty-one and pregnant with my younger sister when the accident happened, and it couldn’t have been easy trying to raise a toddler and a newborn while her husband worked to relearn basic cognitive, verbal, and motor skills. Their marriage just couldn’t recover from the trauma of it all.

  My mom, sister, and I went to live with my grandparents. I can remember feeling confused as to why Mommy and Daddy weren’t living in the same house and also irritated when we had to work out “who has the kids on what weekend.” I remember feeling sad and scared when they fought.

  My mom gave me an old wedding picture of them lacquered on a piece of wood with felt on the back. I used to sleep with it under my pillow, and at night I would hold it and cry. I was angry about the motorcycle wreck and angry that they had divorced. I was convinced that if the wreck hadn’t happened, they would still be married.

  Stepfather #1

  Within a year of my parents’ divorce, my mom married my first ste
pfather, Peter. We moved in with him, and I began kindergarten. I don’t remember where Peter worked or the sound of his voice, but I have never forgotten the way he looked at me—with intense hatred and contempt. He had an office in our house where he would work occasionally. To a little girl who loved art, the paper, pens, and colored pencils in the office made it seem like a room of treasures. Peter would let my little sister come in and draw on paper, but he made me sit in the doorway and just watch. He always showed favor to her and anger toward me. I felt very rejected and confused. Hatred was not even an emotion I knew or could communicate at that point in my life—all I knew was that I could feel it, and it hurt.

  My mom was married to Peter for only about a year, and most of that time has been blacked out in my memory. As a teen, I had a recurring nightmare about him in which I’m playing with my sister in our room, and we decide to call our mom because we want something. Hearing no response, we begin to walk through the house looking for her, but she is nowhere to be found. Then we go to her room and find the door shut. As I reach up to the doorknob to open the door, a feeling of fear and dread comes over me. My sister grabs my hand and moves behind me, as if she feels the same fear. I call out to my mom and still get no answer. We walk slowly around the corner to the master bathroom. The door is open, and through a cloud of steam we see Peter. He looks at us with a strange look on his face and begins to walk slowly toward us. I step in front of my sister and suddenly wake up. When I wake up, I’m terrified and very upset.

  After Peter and my mom split up, we went back to living with my grandparents. I adored my papa and grandma (and still do). They were strong Christians and always took us to church. Papa taught a Sunday school class for senior citizens, and my sister and I loved to tag along. We happily ate cinnamon rolls and suffered pinched cheeks, kisses, and hugs from doting old people as clouds of old cologne and perfume billowed around us. Many of them carried candies in their pockets and purses and snuck them into our little hands. If you had asked me when I was a young child if I was a Christian, I would have told you, “Yes.” But as special and impactful as those moments were, church was still a ritual and not necessarily something real and understood in my life.