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WORK TITLE: And Still She Laughs
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://kmerrick.com/
CITY: Carpinteria
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.dcjacobson.com/kate-merrick/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Britt Merrick (a pastor); children: Isaiah Harley, Daisy Love (deceased), and Pheodora Sunshine.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and public speaker. Cofounder with husband of the Reality family of churches, CA.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kate Merrick is a cofounder with her husband of a family of churches based in California. She is also the author of And Still She Laughs: Defiant Joy in the Depths of Suffering. The book is part memoir in which Merrick reflects on the death of her daughter in 2013 and part investigation into Bible stories recounting the resilience of women. “Kate Merrick takes her readers on a journey of loss and restoration of faith,” wrote a Mojito with a Twist website contributor.
Merrick recounts how she was basically a joyful person with a ready laugh, even when laughing likely was not appropriate. At one point, according to Merrick, she crawled under a table to hide laughter that she could not stop. However, when Merrick’s young daughter, Daisy, dies from cancer after a three-and-a-half year battle, Merrick finds the joy in her life gone and a pall descending over the entire family. She writes that it was hard to really live and she felt she was just going through the motions. “The days and weeks following Daisy’s earthly departure were of a strange sort,” Merrick writes in the introduction to And Still She Laughs, adding: “Hovering in our home was an empty feeling, much like when a door slams shut in your face. You feel the rush of air forcing your hair back for a brief moment, then a wall directly in front of you, so close up that everything else is out of focus.”
In telling her story, Merrick recounts the stages of pain and suffering she and her family went through as Daisy battled cancer. To help deal with the pain and find joy in life once again after her death, Merrick turned to the Bible and sought out stories of women who suffered tremendous losses but emerged on the other side of their grief to once again find happiness. In her discussion of these biblical heroines, Merrick, for example, ponders how Sarah, who was unable to bear children for twenty-five years, learned to overcome her bitterness and eventually became the mother of nations. Merrick also draws strength from the story of Bathsheba, whose first husband is killed in battle as arranged by Bathsheba’s lover, David.
“I love the richness of Kate’s authenticity in her writing,” wrote A Simple Life Really?! website contributor Jalynn Patterson, adding: “She is very real and it shows throughout the book.” A Publishers Weekly contributor called And Still She Laughs “an accessible, heart-wrenching primer” on coping with life’s tragedies and went on to note that Merricks “comical antics bring some needed lightness to this heavy topic.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Merrick, Kate, And Still She Laughs: Defiant Joy in the Depths of Suffering, Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson (Nashville, TN), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2017, review of And Still She Laughs, p. 63.
ONLINE
A Simple Life, Really?!, http://asimplelifereally.blogspot.com/ (March 20, 2017), Jalynn Patterson, review of And Still She Laughs.
D.C. Jacobson & Associates website, http://www.dcjacobson.com/ (October 25, 2017), author profile.
Deb’s Book Reviews, http://debs-bookreview.blogspot.com/ (May 1, 2017), review of And Still She Laughs
Kate Merrick Website, http://kmerrick.com (October 25, 2017).
Mojito with a Twist!, https://mojitowithatwist.wordpress.com/ (May 7, 2017), review of And Still She Laughs.
KATE MERRICK
Kate Merrick
Kate Merrick is the co-founder of the Reality family of churches along with her husband Britt. They have been in ministry for 18 years; with college kids for seven years and more recently with “grown ups”. She is a speaker and writer known for transparency and rawness, mother to a teenager and a toddler, and recently she has endured the death of her eight-year old daughter, Daisy. This great suffering has brought about the need to dig deeper into Jesus and His word and not only suffer well, but live as He intends her to.
Kate is relatable to women because of her humor, openness, and willingness to get real. It’s been said that she can make you laugh and cry in the same breath while all the glory goes to Jesus. Kate intends to live an incredibly full life and desires to take her readers with her on the journey to laughter.
Website: kmerrick.com & prayfordaisy.com
Hi! I'm Kate. I'm wife to Britt Merrick, mom to Isaiah Harley, Daisy Love, and Pheodora Sunshine. We have a little church in Carpinteria, California. My first book And Still She Laughs released March 7, 2017.
pg. 3
And Still She Laughs: Defiant Joy in the Depths of Suffering
Publishers Weekly. 264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
And Still She Laughs: Defiant Joy in the Depths of Suffering
Kate Merrick.Thomas Nelson, $16.99 trade
paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-7180-9281-8
Merrick, speaker and pastor's wife, details the harrowing journey of caring for her young daughter Daisy from a cancer diagnosis in 2009 until her eventual death in 2013. Speaking from the heart, she regales just how profound her suffering was at each stage of her young child's cancer battle, and how God revealed Himself to her along the way. In telling her story and pain, Merrick has created an accessible, heart-wrenching primer on dealing with the worst life has to offer that is equally poignant and inspirational. Not confined to sadness, Merrick is also often funny, and her comical antics bring some needed lightness to this heavy topic. Readers will find their own way through grief as Merrick points out the power of small lights of hope found in everyday joys. True to her subtitle, she is defiant in finding courage, hope, and a stalwart trust in God as she continues to feel the loss of her daughter. Merrick's deeply personal story will be great medicine for the brokenhearted, downhearted, and downtrodden. (Mar.)
MONDAY, MAY 1, 2017
And Still She Laughs ~ Kate Merrick
This is a very inspirational book of one women that lost her young child to cancer and kept going. Kate tells us of her own heartbreak, tears and laughter of how to get through it all in GOD's way. She will give us her story and then give a story of a women in the bible that had to deal with experiences also.
I would recommend this read to anyone that wants a great story of how laughter is the best medicine for anything in life. This is a very inspirational, encouraging and teaches the word of GOD. Loved this book and it would make a great gift for anyone. **Remember Mother's Day is coming up**
Posted by Jalynn Patterson at 4:03 PM
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.
My Review:
In the midst of grief the last thing you want to do is laugh. Laughing is the farthest from your mind yet it is something that must be done in order to find your way out of those very dark and lonely places. If we stay in those places too long they become part of us which in the end will define us. Not the coming out of it but living with the grief so much that it is who are.
Kate Merrick knows this pain and darkness too well. In fact she knows it better than anybody and she wants to help us see the way out. She hopes through her journey she can show you the light at the other end of that unending tunnel of darkness to a better place of moving on from the grief.
I love the richness of Kate's authenticity in her writing. She is very real and it shows throughout the book. She is a great mentor for grieving people!
**Disclosure** This book was sent to me free of charge for an honest review from the author. All opinions are my own.
BOOK REVIEW
Book Review: And Still She Laughs by Kate Merrick
When grief strikes our happy life, as happy as it’s possible, the faith trembles and confusion strikes. Kate Merrick takes her readers on a journey of loss and restoration of faith in her book, And Still She Laughs – Defiant Joy in the Depths of Suffering. Kate has always been a girl who enjoys a good laughter. She remembers how she couldn’t stop herself from bursting into a good laugh even at the most inappropriate times. The funniest moment was when she had to crawl under a table because she could not stop laughing. Anyway, when her five-year-old daughter, Daisy, was diagnosed with cancer, her life turned upside down. The humor stopped making fewer appearances and her entire family succumbed to the horror of this disease. Needless to say, the loss of her daughter after a few years of the diagnosis broke her heart. She began questioning her faith in god.
She describes the pain of losing a child in such a manner that one can’t help but feel her pain as if it were their own. I don’t have a child, but I could feel how a mother would have felt. The moments when we are going through an immense pain, we begin questioning the methods of god and why does he allow us to suffer. The same questions haunted Kate for a long time. She turned to Bible for answers. She read about the lives of Bathsheba, Mary, Hagar, and Sarah. She took inspiration from the lives of these ladies. The suffering that they went through and still the faith (among other attributes) that they exhibited.
Other than the biblical references, Kate has mentioned many stories from her own life. These are the stories that would motivate a reader to not dwell upon insignificant worries. Sometimes, we need to sit back and understand that most of our worries are “just a little bit of poop.” Most of the times, we are so deeply drowned in the past that we forget to look at the present. If we are stuck in our sorrows of the past, we would never be able to see what blessings are present in our lives. As she rightly says,
I need to agree with Jesus that, while things can be different or even disappointing, there is still a life abundant for me to grab hold of.
Although I learned a lot from this book, the idea of keeping faith when the whole world seems dark has been the most enlightening one. Kate has used all the right references and words to ensure that this idea sinks deep into the hearts of her readers. We all know the importance of faith; however, when sorrow strikes with all its might, the first thing that goes out the window is faith. Confusion replaces this wonderful emotion, and we are left with nothing but emptiness.
Faith and confusion seem to bleed together, running down until you aren’t sure what it was supposed to look like in the first place.
How true it is! I know I’ve doubted god in my hours of sorrows and pain. I applaud the author’s beautiful description of faith and its importance. I do not wish to fill the entire review with the quotes from her book, but I can’t help but share her simple yet effective depiction of faith,
Faith raises the dead; faith says yes to God when he says no to our requests. Faith is the love note we give to God. It’s the act, or rather the choice, that pleases him.
Amidst all the positives, I found that sometimes the author spent too much time on one concept. Each idea sank deep enough in a few pages quite effectively, but the author kept trying too hard to make it sink even deeper; this, to me, seemed a little overwhelming.
Having said that, I believe Kate has done a wonderful job of stimulating the brains and hearts of her readers. There are many useful concepts in the book that would enlighten the readers beyond their imagination. I have learned so much from Kate and her inspiring words that I feel I’ve become a better version of myself already. I rate this book 4 out of 5 stars. I think the target audience of And Still She Laughs would be the readers who enjoy memoirs and self-help genres.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers