My new album called Sing Over Me is coming out in the next six weeks or so. They are all songs from God’s perspective, based on verses where he is talking. It is by far my favorite project I have ever done. I believe that it will help people that are going through depression, divorce, loneliness, death, or any other number of heartaches remember that they are loved.

Watch this video so you can learn more and can also hear a bit of the music in the background…Plus now you will get to see The Sexy Celibate in real life, since I hardly ever post videos of myself up here.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sing-over-me/x/1824239?show_todos=true

If you’d like to hear some of my older music, click on the free 12 song giveaway above.

I am doing an Indiegogo campaign to put a dent into the funds for this project, and also to get it into your hands. I would love your help! It really doesn’t cost any more than buying it outright. Plus you can also get my book and other CDs as incentives.

Thanks for all your help!

Love, Kate

My book Getting Naked Later: A Guide For the Fully Clothed is on sale for only $10 for a limited time! You should buy it.

Also, I am going on a tour through Switzerland, France, and Italy. If anyone has contacts for these places where people might want me to speak, play music, lead worship, or just let me stay with them, will you let me know? You can contact me here.

On to the post…

I had a friend tell me something really beautiful the other day. He is going through a faith crisis and is having to rethink everything he has ever believed.

He said to me, “Kate, I think that I am a lot like Peter. Peter had all these grandiose ideas about who Jesus was. That he was going to give him riches and fame and save his people from physical slavery. When Jesus died, all of those ideas of Jesus died with him. Peter was so confused. He didn’t know what to believe any more.

I don’t know what to believe any more, either. But maybe this is a process in which Jesus can show me who he really is. Maybe it will help me realize that he is different and bigger than I ever expected him to be. “

I have been thinking about this for days. I, too, have been going through a faith crisis. My dad dying seven months ago really shook me up.

For the first few months, I didn’t mourn as much as I thought I should. I felt bad about my lack of emotion. But the other day, while holding his death certificate in my hands. I cried and cried. I will never see him again.

Where is my dad, really? I have ask myself. Is he really still alive somewhere? It’s hard to even touch the idea of him being in hell. I just can’t believe that. And asking myself that makes me question everything I believe. I have wondered if God is actually good. I have wondered if God exists at all.

Added to my mourning for my dad is the heart wrenching process of not being married, of not bearing children. I have questioned words that I was sure I heard from the Lord. I have been trying and trying to believe that if I never had a family, if those words never came true, that God would still be good.

Added to that is the pain in the world that is just beyond my comprehension. I wonder about God’s existence almost every time I hear of something horrible happening. That never used to happen to me. It has only happened in this season, and I don’t like it at all.

This is a wilderness time My ideas of Jesus are dying. It is a time when I realize that God does not just grant me everything I wish for if I pray hard enough or live an upright life. He is not a genie in a bottle that will give me what I want if I rub him the right way. There is no intimacy in that way of thinking. There is no mystery in that way of thinking.

I could easily believe that this faith crisis means that I am in a bad place. A place in which I am faithless and not following the Lord. I may kick and scream, asking that I can go back to that simple place where I was before.

But when I think about it, I realize that it is really a better place that I am in. A deeper place. And that comforts me. I am not losing my faith. I am walking into a place of mystery.

I have come to believe that there are levels to faith. Here is a simplifying of those levels.

Certainty- This is similar to the time when Jesus walked the earth. The disciples saw what Jesus was doing and put that through the filter of their own lives. Here is how Jesus will help me get what I want, they said.  They had formulas. They boxed Jesus in . Everything was black and white to them.

Wilderness- This is what Peter must have felt when Jesus died. Everything he believed about Jesus was crucified. Peter denied Jesus because he was so confused about who he was. He questioned everything he believed. He saw all his dreams dying on that tree. And he was afraid.

Mystery- This is what Peter must have experienced when Jesus rose from the dead. He realized that Jesus was doing more than rescuing his people from physical slavery. He was rescuing them from emotional and spiritual slavery. He was setting them free in ways he had never imagined. The resurrection was a total mystery to him. He embraced the fact that he cannot, will never, understand the great mystery of who God is. His fathomless beauty. His frustrating hiddenness. His eternal, all encompassing, baffling love. The way he embraces us even in our deep deep doubting.

This changed Peter’s life. He no longer wanted to be famous or obtain riches. He wanted to spread the goodness of the Lord all over the world. He died hanging on a tree like Jesus did. He had embraced the doubt which led to the mystery. He probably kept doubting. But he also kept believing.

God has so many facets to him. He is like the biggest diamond you have ever seen. If I were to look at one tiny portion of that diamond for the rest of my life, I would still not have touched even that tiny part of him. He is beyond all comprehension. Eternity can’t hold him.

And yet, he is also like a tiny leaf that I hold in my hand. He makes himself small so that he can be with me.

That is the place that I want to be. In between the tension of mystery and intimacy. A place where I can’t see anything in front of me in this dark dark place, but believing that there is one who will catch me in that darkness if I fall.

A place where I don’t box him in, but I do let him in.

Today, I read an article on the Relevant Magazine called The Myth Of Perfect Dating. The article talked about the Christian cha cha that we tend to do with dating, where you keep taking two steps forward and then one step back. I like him! You cry! Two steps forward. But is this God’s will? One step back. Maybe we’ll get married! Two steps forward. Wait a second, I barely know him. One step back. He is actually really wonderful! Two steps forward. But dang it, was that magazine article about breaking up a sign that we shouldn’t be together? Three steps back. Can you say double mindedness?

I am going to take the analogy one step further and say that Christian dating can be even more like rave. We jump up and down in a spiritually inebriated stupor for three months screaming at the top of our lungs is he the one? hoping that the messages in the clamoring music will give us an answer. Then we fall down in a heap of exhausted despair when it wasn’t everything we thought it would be. Or else we continue raving for another three months.

To put it bluntly, we are a little on the hysterical side when we date.

I think the reason for this is that we think about marriage much sooner than the mainstream world. Rather than just getting to know someone day by day, getting good information over a solid amount of time, we want to know now. We ask is this the one chosen for us since the beginning of time where it was written in the glorious portal of heaven that the love our lives would fall on our doorstep at the right time with a bunch of gerber daisies and some quality chick flicks? 

The answer is how the heck are you supposed to know that when you just met the guy? 

We have a frenzied desire to have an answer about whether we’re going to marry this person, which has been spurred on by the tsunami of the I Kissed Dating Goodbye era. This era gave us the damaging idea that we should know if we should marry someone even before we date them. (For more on this phenomenon, read my series 90′s Dating Gone Bad. )

What do we do to aleve these frantic thoughts? We ask God to tell us what  to do. We ask for signs and look for them everywhere. If the next person I talk to says the word banana, that means I’m supposed to go out with him. Stuff like that.

The truth is, we are scared. And when we are scared, we tend to over spiritualize things. Dating is risky business. We don’t like the out of control feeling it brings us. We want God to give us an answer now so we don’t have to be scared any more. So we can have control over the situation through knowing the answer to our questions, while in truth, God may want to answer our questions gradually.

This kind of franticness is contrary to many verses in the bible, like “be anxious for nothing” or “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself.”

One of my favorite things to do is float in water. I am really good at it. Like I could do it for hours. I guess I am just a really buoyant person. One time I was talking to the lifeguard at my gym, and he was like “Oh, I know who you are. You’re the floater. Dude, teach me to relax like that.” He spoke with a slight sense of awe, as if had discovered I was James Bond or something.

The reason I love floating so much is that it is a place of complete rest for me. All that I can feel is the water underneath me, surrounding me. It run through my hands, and the coolness of it against my skin is all I feel in that moment. The clamor of the world fades away until all I can hear is my heart beat.  In that place, I can block all the world out until it is just my spirit and God’s communing with each other.

As I am floating,  I will meditate on some phrase, repeating it over and over like God, surround me like this water surrounds me or Be still and know that I am God.

I am not always a peaceful person. I have rave parties going through my head all of the time. But the more I choose to “still and quiet my soul, like a child with it’s mother” as it says in Psalm 131, the more I choose to trust in God’s goodness and be at peace with the gradual process I am in.

So choose to quiet your soul. Stop going to rave parties and do water ballet with God instead. (Was that an awesome last line or what?)

Frank Viola has just released a new book called God’s Favorite Place on Earth that could literally change your relationship with God, help you defeat bitterness, free you from a guilty conscience, and help you overcome fear, doubt and discouragement once and for all.

By the way, if you haven’t bought my book Getting Naked Later: A Guide for the Fully Clothed you can buy it here. Also, you should check out the reviews! I’ve gotten six 5 star reviews since it came out a month ago!

I have been in thirty three weddings.

I am not talking about how many I’ve been to, but  how many I’ve been in. I was a bridesmaid in some. I am a full time singer songwriter so I have sang and played in many more. Unfortunately, my job in these weddings has never been to walk down the aisle in a white dress. But I tell you what, if I ever get married, I will have lots of ideas to choose from.

Let’s just look at one wedding that I went to a few years ago that is a snapshot of my single life

Two of my dearest friends were getting married. It was a beautiful backyard wedding. Before the wedding started  I was talking to my friend Shannon, a very feisty, happily married 40 year old. This is what Shannon said to me that day, as she gestured towards my curled hair and perfect makeup  and my eggplant colored sleeveless dress that showed off my shoulders

“Kate, you look smoking hot. Too bad it’s just wasted. “

Most of you that are single are shaking the heads, putting this comment in the mental file called “insensitive things that married people say to single people.” Believe me, that mental file is chock full of comments people have made to me over the years , but this was not one of them. I  was not offended by this remark, because I knew that Shannon meant it as a compliment. What she was saying is “What the heck, Kate? You are wonderful person. I don’t understand why you’re still single. ” People say this to me often.

It is kind of a mystery to all of us.

During the wedding, I sang a love song that I wrote. My married friend Seth came up to me and said “Kate, in that dress, singing that song, any single guy here would want to dance with you. ” I felt very flattered. At the reception, thinking about those two comments as I was eating my chicken a la king, I started to feel very confident, brazen even. I was beautiful. Someone would want to dance with me.

I began to anticipate the dancing that was about to begin. One of those handsome single groomsmen would see me across the room and think “that was the girl who sang her song during the wedding. She fascinates me. I want to dance with her. ” He would walk up shyly and  ask me.  We would step out onto the dance floor and he would gently take my hand. Even that would give me butterflies, since no one has touched my hand in a long time. And then we would move together. Two peopled with different personalities, different weakness’, different strengths, moving as if they were one.

Maybe I would even fall in love.

The time came for the single men to ask the single women to dance.  I stood at the edge of the floor in anticipation like Cinderella at the ball.

No one asked me to dance.

Instead of feeling like the intriguing girl everyone wanted to dance with, I felt more like the Old Maid in that children’s card game- standing alone while everyone else paired up. I could have pulled out my knitting needles and my rocking chair right then and there. I wanted to say “Hey! Single guys! Over here! According to my married friends, this dress makes me look smoking hot! Doesn’t anyone want to dance with me?” I waited, hoping for a falling-in-love-worthy  song. Surely all those groomsmen were just being shy.

Sadly, the next song was anything but romantic. Can you guess what it was? I’ll give you one hint: it has nothing to do with wedded bliss and everything to do with an athletic club.

That’s right folks, the YMCA.

The YMCA seems to be a dance designed for people who can’t dance. A dance that you could do even if you were in a wheelchair.  If you are unable to learn the incredibly complicated 80′s dance that involves hopping up and down alone, you can at least fling your arms out to spell things. ”Look at us!” we say. ” Who says we can’t dance? We are so coordinated! We can all spell out the letters for the Young Men’s Christian Association in perfect unison! “

I was annoyed, but I still I went out there and “danced” with all the other bad dancers.  More accurately I “spelled.” But I wasn’t in perfect unison with them. Instead of YMCA, I was spelling WPCD. A little secret joke between me and myself. White People Can’t Dance.  This has been a tradition for me at weddings ever since then. *

Finally, towards the end of the wedding came the dance I really wanted to participate in, even if it was reminiscent of awkward middle school moments;  slow dancing whities. **

But there would be no slow dancing for me. Not even in my smoking hot dress.

I wanted love, and instead, I got the white man’s overbite.

Seriously God? Seriously?

That night was kind of a snapshot of my life.  The reception started out with me eating at a table with dear friends and loving life.  I laughed. I felt accepted.  I was thankful. But then the dancing came and everyone took their partner . Another pair and another pair and another pair. I sat at the table and slowly ate my wedding cake, an important stance when you don’t want to look like you have nothing to do while everyone is dancing.  I tried really hard not to cry.

I don’t want this to be difficult for me. I want to be satisfied in who I am as a single woman. But when I look at those pairs dancing, no matter how hard I try to fight it,  I don’t feel smoking hot. I feel alone.

How do we find hope that is still hope even if it doesn’t end in a wedding dress? How can we prepare ourselves if we do get married? How can we be thankful for where we are today?  What can singles and married people learn from each other to help us cope with this journey? Is a life that has no intimate witness still valuable? If a traditional family never comes to us, are we doomed to loneliness, or can we build our own family?   Does God see me alone at my table, eating my wedding cake? Does He care? Does He feel the same way at times?

These are some of the questions that I want to explore in this blog. I love the thought of you going on this journey with me. Let’s walk fully clothed along this road together.

*I looked up YMCA and wedding on the internet as “research” and found this in Yahoo Answers:

Question: “Do fundamentalist Christians do the YMCA dance at weddings? It just seems like it would be the dance of the devil. Which village people singer do they like the most?”

Best Answer- chosen by asker “The Village People are a creation of Fundamentalist Christians, so yes. They like the construction worker best because the Lord likes hard work. “

Another not so popular answer was “Fundamental Christians prefer the Hokey Pokey, while pentacostals are hot for the electric slide.”  This is what happens when you do research on the internet.

**All of these moves and more can be seen on the youtube video “How To Dance Like A White Guy.”  Very scientific, incredibly accurate internet research.

I have thought about writing a post like this for a while. But I kept shying away from it. It seemed so risky.

Risky because I didn’t know how you would respond.

Risky because some of you might believe I don’t trust God.

Risky because people I know and love read my blog and might look at me differently.

Risky because I am a Christian minister of the Gospel. I am not supposed to feel this way.

But after the son of Rick Warren took his life this week, I feel like it is needed.

Henri Nouwen said “what is most personal is most universal.”I love that quote because it gives me courage to say what I have to say, knowing that many of you out there are in the same place. You need to know you are not alone.

So here it is: I have struggled on and off with clinical depression since I was fourteen years old. It is a disease I inherited from my father, who self medicated for many years. I feel so much compassion for my dad, because he never even knew that he needed help. He just thought that he was incredibly sad and that there was nothing he could do about it except self medicate. I am at least blessed enough to recognize that there is something physically wrong with my body, that I don’t have to live like this if I don’t want to, and that I can escape a life of addiction by getting the help I need.

If you knew me, you would be really surprised that I struggle with this. Most people have no idea. As my roommate said to me, it’s not that I hide it, it’s that I fight hard to see that it doesn’t take over my life or ruin my relationships. That’s why people don’t often know.

My first bout with the depression was in middle school. My family was in shambles. My friends at school had all abandoned me. In my mind, I had no reason left to live. I had suicidal thoughts and cried all the time.

Thankfully, about a year later some wonderful believing friends came in and became like family to me, introducing me to Jesus.

I thought that was the end of my depression. I was wrong.

In college, I went through the worst bout of depression I have ever suffered through after a bad break up. I would cry for hours at a time. I would even hit my head on the wall sometimes without wanting to. I didn’t know how to control these emotions. They seemed to overtake me.

Then, I had a life changing experience in Mexico, where God told me that as many times as the ocean waves kept crashing to the shore, that’s how many times he would heal me. I believed him. It changed my life.

That story became my testimony for ten years. I have told that story a hundred times. It always ended it with “I threw away my medication, and I have never been depressed again.”

But I was wrong. That wasn’t the end of my depression.

I felt small bouts of depression throughout those ten years, but I would push them away. These are just attacks of the enemy, I thought. If I just say the right words, (in the name of Jesus! Do not be anxious for anything!) everything will be ok. The leaders in my life supported this kind of thinking. Any time I ever mentioned medication, people looked at me like I was crazy. Of course you don’t need to do that, Kate! Jesus is your everything! Just step into the joy he has already given you! So I tried and tried to do that. It just didn’t always work.

Some time in the middle of those ten years I contracted Lyme disease. I was very sick for seven years, as a lot of you know. The worst symptom was extreme insomnia.  I would go four nights without sleeping day or night, sleep for three hours the next night, then go another four nights. It was like this for six years. It was horrible.

I thought this insomnia was just a symptom of the Lyme disease and that it would go away now that the Lyme disease is cured. But I found out from a psychiatrist recently that the insomnia that was initially from the Lyme disease  actually jacked up the chemicals in my brain until I was suffering from a more permanent disease called cyclothymia. This disease can make me depressed during the day and then revs my brain up so much that I can’t sleep.  Cyclothymia was not a disease that was in conjunction with my inherited depression. It was ON TOP of the other depression, two totally different diseases.

I finally realized that the problems were so bad that I needed to get medication. When I got on the right medication, I started sleeping through night for the first time in years.

Did I stop loving God when I started taking medication? No. Did I stop trusting that God could be my everything and my joy? No. I still love God, just like someone with cancer still loves God when they choose to use radiation.

I have read before that if David were alive today, he would probably have been diagnosed with bipolar. He was an extreme, brilliant man who went from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. All symptoms of mental illness. Yet he was a man after God’s own heart. In the midst of David’s bouts of highs and lows he prayed this prayer:  “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” (Psalm 42:5)

David talks to his soul as if it is another person, and I understand that, somehow. My soul feels separate from my true self. My soul is the part of me that gets so sad that I can barely handle it. My soul is the part that feels like I have no hope. But my soul is not all of me. I may never be able to make the sadness go away, but the sadness is not who I  am.

Maybe I can say, like David “Soul, I love you, but you are not the boss. My spirit is the boss. And my spirit says that we are going to get through this. My spirit says that it is not time to give up. My spirit says that we can keep praising God in the midst of our sorrow.”

Are those words a secret formula that will make a physical illness go away? No. They do however depict this truth: even in the midst of emotions that feel out of control and horrible we can still choose hope. We can try to find our spirit in the midst of our soul and ask that spirit to be strong. The sad part of us needs to be loved, but it does not need to be fed. We can visit the same places, but we don’t have to stay there as long.

(If you haven’t read my poem “You Are Stronger Than You Think You Are”  which is actually a response to my battle with depression, you should now, especially if you have similar struggles.)

I want you to look at me, now. I am a worship leader on staff at a church. I have a blog you read. I am an author. I make music and tour. I look totally strong and pretty dang successful. But I have all of this going on inside of me.

How many other people do you think are struggling with hidden depression and other mood disorders in your very own church? My psychiatrist has told me that half the population will have suffered through some kind of depression or other mood disorder in their life. That’s a lot of people hiding a lot of pain. We as the church need to make a safe place so that people feel like they can come forward and heal.

The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book says ”When we are crushed by a crisis we could
not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that
either God is everything or else He is nothing. Choose.”

Tragedies make us choose. There is a door of opportunity that has opened before us because of the horrible death Rick Warren’s son.  We as a church can choose  to keep ignoring the problem of mental illness, or we can collectively turn around, our arms open wide, and welcome those that have felt ostracized for years.

Side note: If you didn’t read the last post, my book is here! I think you will love it! You can buy it by clicking the “My Book” tab at the top of this page.

I can’t believe it friends! The book is finally here! 

You can buy a copy of it on this website. You can also click the “my book” tab at the top of this page any time you would like to buy it.

I think you will really like it. I honestly think I would read it even if I hadn’t written it, and that is saying a lot. 

I’d love your support! Please share the website, which is gettingnakedlater.com on your facebook pages and such. 

I couldn’t have done it without you!

Sehnsucht- A huge and painfully unrequited yearning to find and touch the mystery. An extreme desire for a far off country you have never been to. A deep and insatiable desire for a home that you haven’t yet had. 

This German word is very hard to define in any language. But when you read the definition you know exactly what it means, don’t you? You can conjure up the feeling associated with the word because you feel it every day. It is a hidden desire  running under your skin even as you go to the bank and sweep the floor and buy your groceries. It’s the aching and mystery that arises as you mourn over your singleness or are reminded that your marriage is not all you hoped it would be. It is the faint pain like bruising on your skin that grows more beautiful and more painful as you get older because of the wisdom and the regrets that are birthed from the days you have walked.

This word has been on my mind since my last session with my counselor. I was talking to her about my recent visit to my college town and the longing I now had  for that season, the longing  I had for men that I dated in that season that I gave up on. The wishing I had done things differently. The wanting to go back to that mysterious place and make different choices. The deep desire to revisit the essence of the nostalgia I was feeling in order to live it out in the present moment.

She said to me “did you like being there while you were there? Were you happy?” I couldn’t remember. I found it ironic that I longed for a place that I missed now, but I didn’t even notice it while I was there.

“Kate,” my counselor said “you have always had this deep sense of longing, of dissatisfaction, even of suffering. You had it then, you have it now. Even if you one day finally have children and a husband, you will still have it. You can’t escape the longing. “

I knew she was right. I can’t escape this longing, this desire for a place I have never been to. Because I am human. Because I was born with that longing. It has been said that no other creature is as inherently dissatisfied as the human being. But I don’t think it’s our fault. I think it’s part of our nature.

In fact, I would argue that this sensucht, this deep longing for somewhere we’ve never been, is evidence for the existence of heaven, evidence for the existence of God. Can an atheist argue against his insatiable desire for home? Can an agnostic ignore the fire down in his bones saying that he was made for more than the life he is living?

Psalm 84:5 says “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.” Another translations says “in whose heart are the highways to Zion.” Our hearts are set on pilgrimage, a long, beautiful, painful journey that will end in a glorious homecoming. Our hearts have highways to Zion in them, and after many years of walking those highways with perseverance, we will reach that mountain in which the glory of the Lord dwells, where all of our desires behind our sehnsucht will be realized.

CS Lewis’ was all but obsessed with the idea of sehsucht, the idea of looking for True North. In his book The Problem of Pain he says

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

One day, at the end of your journey, you will say these words. “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

Side note- I wanted to share my music with you for free since I know many of you didn’t even realize that I am a musician for a living. To download ten free songs- just click on the tab on top of the page, click on the link, and download! Hope you enjoy my gift to you!

Hey all! I wanted to bless you all with some of my music.

                Here is a free 10 song sampler for you

Do me a favor and click the “Share on Facebook” or “Tweet” buttons once you download. Thanks!

Bless every one of you!

PS- The book should be out this week! Keep your eyes peeled!

Side Note: My book should be out in a few weeks so get ready! I think you will really like it. If you are a blogger with pretty good traffic or know of any bloggers or authors that could help me out, could you message me via my website? I can send them a free book to review.

On to the post!

I have a secret to tell you. It is a secret I have only told a few of my closest friends. It is such a stunning secret that I never even hinted at it to my last boyfriend, and I told him pretty much everything about my life. But not this. I knew that his view of me would change if I told him.

First, let me add here that I am a pretty deep person. As stated in a previous post, I have gone to monasteries all over the world to have solitude retreats. I work with homeless people on a regular basis and have even gone so far as to be homeless for a few days to understand them. I write music that makes people cry at times. I love books by contemplatives like Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton.

I would like to make you believe that the deep, beautiful, mystical Kate is who I am all the time. To convince you that there is no such thing as the weak, insecure Kate.

But your view of me is about to change when I reveal my secret. Making this confession is especially scary to me, because you are now going to know a part of me that I don’t like very much.

OK. Here I go. Here is my secret: I watch The Bachelor.

Now I feel much shallower than I make myself out to be. I honestly would rather have admitted that I used to be a drug dealer.

I have always secretly looked down on people that watch a lot of TV. I was better than them. I would read books instead of watching television. I would not be materialistic. I would be counter-culture. I would be deep. I would be a super-non-TV-watching-intriguing-indie-music-listening-mystical-social- justice-loving-follower-of-Jesus-who-wears-Toms-shoes.

But during the last few years, when I was in ministry school and being taught about spiritual things all the time, when I was working with homeless people and feeling so sad for them, when I was touring and meeting so many people that I was sapped of all my energy, well, sometimes I just wanted to stop thinking.

During these difficult seasons, I realized that I could have TV on my own laptop and hide it a little more. It became less of a social event and more of a private event. So I started watching it. And The Bachelor became my one staple TV show.

I know, I know. If I’m going to watch one show, why would I choose this one? It is just ridiculous. Every season it is the same. The man with the perfect chest and perfect charm. The synthetically-endowed, bikini-wearing, bleached-hair-perfect, gorgeous women. Some of them are sweet; some of them are psycho. In fact, I heard a radio program in which a reality show producer admitted to trying to cast forty percent narcissists and people who are crazy enough to make good television but not crazy enough to bash the camera in with a bat.

And for some mysterious reason, I love every minute of it.

I admit, I have a problem. I all but tap my arm before I shoot myself up with a new season. Why, I ask myself? Why would I want to watch this show?

In order to feel less shallow, I like to tell myself that I’m not just watching TV, I am observing a sociological experiment. I ask myself with a very scientific air, “What is the psychological process of a man who is put into a room with a number of beautiful women? When he has to choose who he wants to break up with and who he wants to keep?”

I convince myself that I’m a lot like Jane Goodall, only instead of watching monkeys and the way they interact, I’m observing a bunch of hot people.

I’m not watching this for entertainment, people! I’m watching it for research! Under my blanket and with my headphones on, so my housemates won’t hear the mumbling of romantic TV encounters coming from under the door. What’s wrong with that?

There. I feel better now. I just admitted to you some of my strongest parts and some of my weakest parts. I hope you will choose to love both sides, and I pray that I will do the same for others, especially if I get married. If  marriage is what God has for me, my spouse will be real and he will be hard to live with at times. But that is okay because I will be real, too, and I will be hard to live with at times, too. When I don’t expect my mate to be ideal, I won’t expect myself to be ideal. I will feel more free to be the imperfect me. I won’t need to hide anymore. I won’t need to have secrets. I can confess things and not be afraid that it will make me unlovable.

Even now, while we are single, it is important to love our friends and family for who they are, not for who we want them to be.

As my friend Brandon says, marriage should not be about finding a perfect person who will meet all of your needs. Marriage should be about creating a room where both of you can be human.

And I wouldn’t mind a room in which I am occasionally allowed to watch reality television.