And Still She Laughs: Defiant Joy in the Depths of Suffering

$20.99

Kate Merrick

Testimony Video

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Description

Kate Merrick examines the Bible’s gritty stories of resilient women as well as her own experience losing a child—a journey followed by more than a million on prayfordaisy.com—to reveal the reality of surprising joy and deep hope even in the midst of heartache.

Kate Merrick faced the crippling grief that life can bring when her five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. Three and a half years of suffering followed, accompanied by fervent prayer, hospital stays, emotional agony, and teeth-grinding fear. And in the end, her baby girl was gone.

How was Kate to believe again, to hope again? To find out, she turned to stories in the Bible of real women who dealt with pain and survived. How did Sarah, after twenty-five years of achingly empty arms, learn in the end to laugh without bitterness? How did Bathsheba, defiled by the king who then had her husband killed, come to walk in strength and dignity, to smile without fear of the future?

In And Still She Laughs, Merrick writes poignantly and transparently about finding joy in sorrow and shows how we—just like the ordinary women seen in the Bible—can rise above unbearable circumstances and live fully. In the middle of whatever hardships we face, we can smile, cry, and come away full—laughing without fear and eagerly looking for what is to come.

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Kate Merrick is a writer, speaker, pastor’s wife, mama of a teen and a toddler, surfer, part-time cowgirl, and self-proclaimed chicken whisperer. She has been married to Britt for 19 years and they live in Carpinteria, California, where they founded the Reality family of churches. In 2013 she endured the death of her daughter, Daisy Love, after suffering through cancer treatment for three and a half years. Kate is making her way back toward laughter and finding life to be filled with good things.

More than a million followed Daisy’s journey and fight for life on PrayForDaisy.com, where you can read old posts, watch Daisy’s memorial, and get to know the Merrick family. After Daisy’s passing, Kate was silent for three years in grief and contemplation. She now blogs at KMerrick.com with fresh perspective and newfound freedom to be sentimental or silly or anywhere in between.

Excerpt:

I’ll tell you why: because Daisy died. 

My daughter endured brutal sickness and died a tragic death. Because God allowed so much tragedy in my family. Because it appeared He didn’t hear our cries, because He turned His face from our deepest desire. Because my sparrow fell, and He didn’t seem to notice. That’s why I have so little faith. That’s why it’s difficult to believe I am valuable to God.

But here’s where I’m wrong. Here’s where I have exchanged what I see dimly for what God is crystal clear about. Here’s where I shake up our Western understanding of blessing. 

Whether we are aware of it or not, we tie God’s love directly to the tangible presence of what we consider to be good things, but what if His care for us means something else entirely? 

What if my life turning out exactly the way I wanted it to doesn’t equal God loving me? I didn’t feel God’s love for a while in my grief, but it was there. I had just forgotten the truth.

I was so irked by Paul and his “all things work together” spiel? I was so busy asking Paul snarky questions that I missed how he himself had a tough row to hoe. Mere days after his conversion on the road to Damascus, he started receiving death threats. In the coming years, he was beaten with rods, whipped, given thirty-nine lashes five different times, imprisoned, shipwrecked, stoned. He knew hunger, thirst, heat, and cold, faced dangers in cities, deserts, and on seas. Paul knew suffering.

Yet he wrote this in Romans 8:35, Romans 8:38-39 (emphasis mine):

Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean He no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death?.. I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below — indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Exhale… The love of God is outside of circumstances. I had believed a lie.

Testimony Video

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • ISBN-10: 0718092813
  • ISBN-13: 9780718092818
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces

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