For the Love

By Jen Hatmaker

11 min read

Why does it matter? Because the crushing standard you're holding yourself to isn't God's — it's Instagram's.

Here's a thought you've probably never questioned: exhausting yourself trying to be everything to everyone is the faithful thing to do. It feels humble. It feels like love. It might actually be neither. Jen Hatmaker's argument — wrapped in genuinely funny stories about chickens and high-waisted jeans — is that the crushing composite standard women carry isn't a spiritual calling. It's a cultural fabrication. And the permission to set it down isn't failure or selfishness; it's the beginning of the specific, grace-soaked, seasonally honest life you were actually designed for. Jesus already handled the cosmic accounting. You were never supposed to.

You're Not Falling Short — You're Chasing a Composite That Doesn't Exist

Remy is nine years old when she asks her mother about her first competition. She's already planning the Olympic medals, plus a music career on the side. Jen Hatmaker tells this story about her daughter as an affectionate mirror: that confidence, that total mismatch between current ability and projected glory, is not unique to third-graders. It is the condition of modern womanhood.

Somewhere along the way, the cultural beam got loaded with an impossible number of tricks. Not one or two — all of them at once. Fairy-tale childhoods for the children. A world-changing career. A stunning home. Locally sourced, homemade meals every night. A marriage still burning hot. Deep friendships. Consistent self-care. Active community service. A vibrant, daily relationship with God. Each item on that list, alone, is a reasonable aspiration. Stacked together, they describe a job no human being has the hours or the nervous system to perform. And yet most of us have quietly accepted this composite as the baseline — the thing we should be pulling off, the standard against which a regular Tuesday gets measured and found wanting.

The mechanism keeping this myth alive is less about ambition and more about how we consume other people's lives. We follow the craft mom, the career woman, the chef mom, the Bible study leader — each of them genuinely excellent in her lane — and perform an unconscious merger: I should be all of that. We're not comparing ourselves to any single real woman. We're comparing ourselves to a Frankenstein composite assembled from the highlight reels of dozens, and then feeling like failures for not matching something that has never actually existed.

Hatmaker does something rare here: she names her own infrastructure out loud. She has a booking rep, a literary agent, a tech person, housekeepers, and a part-time nanny. She is not doing it all. Nobody is. The women who appear to ride this particular unicorn are simply showing you the parts that photograph well.

The shift she's proposing isn't better time management or a more optimized morning routine. It's the recognition that the beam itself was invented — and that you are allowed, right now, to decide what actually belongs on it.

The Benchmark That Exposes Every Toxic Doctrine

Most popular Christian advice about calling passes a quick sniff test when you're a financially stable, educated westerner — and collapses the moment you hold it up against someone without those advantages. That collapse is Hatmaker's entire point. She runs one test on every doctrine: if it isn't equally true for a poor single mother in Haiti, it isn't true anywhere. Theology is either universal or it's fiction dressed up in scripture.

Watch what this does to the prosperity gospel in about four seconds. Preach that God rewards faithful believers with health and wealth, and you've quietly made God into someone who despises sincere Christians across most of the planet — every believer who prays just as hard and stays just as poor. The doctrine doesn't wobble under this pressure; it shatters.

Hatmaker turns the same test on the evangelical habit of declaring marriage and motherhood a woman's highest calling. The moment you say that, you've created second-class citizenship for the single, the widowed, the childless, the divorced — a substantial portion of the actual church. The implied message is that they should go eat rocks. A framework that accidentally disqualifies that many people from meaningful gospel participation is not a gospel framework at all.

What the Bible actually says about calling, when Hatmaker goes looking, is almost aggressively non-specific. Five passages, three of which are about salvation rather than career paths. The remaining two say: live in a way that's worthy of the invitation you received, and let goodness and faith-prompted action grow from that. No platform requirement. No audience. No job description. The Haitian mother raising her children, working, doing what needs doing — she satisfies this definition completely. So do you, today, in the life you're already living. The search for a lightning-bolt calling is a luxury problem, and the test is what makes that visible.

Self-Judgment Is Not Humility — It's Contagious Cruelty

Hatmaker's diagnosis here is surgical. Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself, which most people read as a call to generosity. Flip it and read it as description rather than prescription: we love others the way we love ourselves. Someone who talks to herself the way a cruel coach talks to a losing team will eventually talk to her husband, her children, her friends that way too. The pipeline runs one direction — out. Self-criticism doesn't stay in the basement where you keep it. It leaks.

The clearest illustration Hatmaker offers isn't abstract — it's a specific afternoon after visiting a family she'd classify as 'sweet.' One of their children had offered the last brownie to a sibling as a spontaneous birthday gift. That's it. That's all it took. By the time Hatmaker got home, she'd concluded that her kids were headed toward incarceration, her family needed an entirely new communication system, and the gold standard she was failing was Ann Voskamp — a well-known Christian writer whose brand is poetic, gentle domesticity. The spiral wasn't triggered by anything her own kids had done. It was triggered by a single brownie and a five-second comparison between her family's highlight reel and a stranger's.

Then she names the asymmetry that makes this whole mechanism visible: she declares other people's goodness as readily as she confirms her own wretchedness, and those two things move in opposite directions at the same speed. When she actually stepped outside her internal monologue and observed herself parenting, she found warmth, patience, attention — things she'd been actively erasing from the ledger. The self she was condemning was not the self she was watching.

Releasing yourself from the hook, then, isn't self-indulgence. It's the precondition for releasing everyone else. The person who stops auditing her own soul with contempt finds she has far less contempt left over for the people she loves.

The Church Is Exhausting Its Leaders and Infantilizing Its Members — By Design

Pastoral burnout and shrinking congregations look like two separate crises. Hatmaker argues they are one crisis with one cause: a structural design that was broken from the start.

The numbers are hard to dismiss. Nine out of ten pastors work fifty-five to seventy-five hours a week — which means the average Sunday sermon was written by someone who hasn't slept properly in days. Seventy percent are fighting depression. Eighty percent say the job has damaged their families. Seventy percent don't have a single close friend. Only one in ten will still be in ministry when they retire. These aren't statistics about a few burned-out individuals. They describe a near-universal experience across an entire profession. When ninety percent of people in any field feel they're failing at it, the problem isn't the people. It's the architecture.

The architecture Hatmaker names is the 'Come to us' model: the church as a full-service spiritual operation where staff are expected to meet every need, calendar every activity, organize every ministry, and take complete responsibility for the congregation's growth. The practical result is a system that exhausts the people running it while quietly training everyone else into passivity. Congregants show up, receive, and leave — spiritual consumers rather than participants. And when the schedule tips from demanding into impossible, they cite overloaded family calendars as their reason for leaving altogether. The church loses roughly fifty thousand people a week. The leaders collapse. Pastors wonder what more their people want; people wonder what more their pastors want. The machine produces the exact opposite of what it promises.

The prescription isn't optimization — it's decentralization. Stop measuring faithfulness by attendance. An informal dinner conversation with skeptical friends over wine and hummus counts as ministry. Seven people around a kitchen table counts. A Tuesday afternoon of service counts as much as a Sunday morning. When people own their spiritual lives rather than outsourcing them to a program, they become less dependent, less resentful, and more genuinely effective. The pastors get their lives back. The mission actually moves.

Most Mission Trips Are Tourism With a Bible — And the Locals Know It

Every July, a Western church group flew to Ethiopia to paint the walls of a local pastor's children's home. The pastor led a thriving community ministry, but the Americans never asked him what he needed — they already knew. The problem was that his walls were already clean. So each June, the children did what children learn to do when survival requires it: they rubbed the pristine walls with dirt until the damage looked plausible. Then the Americans arrived, painted with great joy and satisfaction, flew home transformed, and posted the pictures.

The locals knew exactly what was happening. They just couldn't afford to say so.

Hatmaker's analysis of why this keeps occurring cuts straight to power. When the wealthy and the poor occupy the same room, the wealthy instinctively assess the situation through what they already have — advantages, assumptions, predetermined plans. The poor people in that room are too polite, too economically dependent, or too practically savvy to challenge the earnest visitors who are, after all, relishing the experience. The gap between what the team believes it accomplished and what the community actually experienced can be total, and nobody on the team ever has to know.

The corrective isn't complicated, but it does require something most trip organizers skip entirely: starting by listening. Not pitching a project, not matching T-shirts, not selecting the neediest-looking community on the map — listening. What has worked here? What has failed? What does your community's own leadership believe it needs most? That conversation, Hatmaker argues, is the entire foundation. Without it, what you have isn't service. It's tourism with good intentions and a paintbrush.

The Generation Leaving Church Isn't Rejecting Jesus — They're Rejecting Performance

Imagine a teenager with finely tuned radar for adult performance — the kid who clocks the exact moment performance replaces authenticity. Now put that kid in a church culture built around polished presentations, confident certainty, and the implicit message that doubt is a problem to be corrected. The radar goes haywire.

Hatmaker opens with an uncomfortable number: nearly three-quarters of American young people who now claim no religion grew up in religious homes. These aren't people who never encountered faith — they're people who did and walked away. Roughly three-quarters leave church between eighteen and twenty-two; by twenty-nine, eighty percent have quietly disengaged. The mechanism, she argues, simply isn't holding.

The reason comes into focus through a generational contrast she names plainly. Most parents grew up inside a modern framework, one whose operating assumption was 'I have all the answers and so can you' — a world that valued authority, tradition, and absolute certainty. Their children inherited a different default: 'I don't have all the answers and neither do you.' To a generation trained since childhood to distrust institutions that have repeatedly failed them, unquestioned authority and certified certainty don't register as trustworthy. They register as performance. These young adults cannot be sold an ideology by someone who simply insists it's correct — they will sniff the sham before the sentence is finished.

So when churches responded to declining youth numbers by upgrading the entertainment — better bands, hipper venues, snappier programming — they made the problem worse. A nationwide survey of adults between eighteen and thirty-five asked what would actually draw them to a church, and they listed community, social justice, depth, and mentorship. Nobody said laser lights. The church cannot out-entertain a world that invented the internet, and trying to do so only confirms the suspicion that what's on offer is a product rather than a reality.

What postmodern young adults actually share with the gospel is striking: care for the poor, suspicion of power, hunger for genuine community, distrust of slick. The values that feel radical to them are the values Jesus held. The fix isn't better programming — it's stripping away the performance and doing the actual thing.

Community Doesn't Need a Program — It Needs a Table and an Invitation

A mutual friend named Jamie sent a cold email to three women who had never met each other. Her pitch was essentially: I know all of you separately, I think you'd love each other, want to start a monthly dinner group? Eight strangers said yes without ever meeting first.

What followed, over four years, was the kind of intimacy most people spend a lifetime not finding. Hatmaker knows these friends' middle names, their parents, every nuance of their children, their dreams and failures and worst holiday memories. The families vacation together every summer. They've cheered each other through published books, adoptions, new jobs, and hard seasons. The group texts alone are apparently so incriminating that public exposure would require everyone to relocate to Peru.

The rules that made it work were specific to the point of severity: rotating houses, no children present, serious food planned a week in advance (the "don't you dare put taco soup on the table" standard), and whatever gets said stays said. Three out of four months, you just show up, eat extraordinary food, and leave someone's kitchen a disaster. The fourth month, you cook your heart out for the people you love.

The clearest test of what the group had actually become came the night Hatmaker and her husband were hosting and a friend got word that her father had been hospitalized ninety minutes away. There was no deliberation. They packed up every pot, every ingredient, the assembled pad Thai components and five sauces, stopped for paper plates, and drove to the family's home. They cooked the meal there, ate together, loaded every dirty dish back into the car, and drove home four hours later. The egg rolls, Hatmaker notes, suffered somewhat from the journey. Their friend wouldn't have.

That drive is what love God, love people looks like when it has somewhere to go.

The practical implication is that community doesn't require a church program, a perfect house, or zero nervousness. It requires an invitation. Invite two couples if you're anxious about awkward silences. Show up honest rather than curated. Be the kind of friend you're hoping for — someone who bleeds a little, who tells the true version. The messy kitchen only proves someone cared enough to feed you. Start there.

Toxic Relationships Aren't a Test of Your Faith — They're a Drain on It

Enduring a toxic relationship indefinitely is not a spiritual virtue — it's a slow drain on everything good in you, and mistaking the two is one of the more effective traps in Christian culture. Hatmaker separates these cleanly with a single word: optional. Some difficult people you are actually free to walk away from, and the permission is even scriptural. Jesus told his disciples to shake the dust off their feet when they encountered hostile people — no apology required, no extended effort to rehabilitate the situation first. He was tender toward genuine brokenness, Hatmaker observes, but had zero patience for egotism. The move-on theology is right there in Matthew 10.

She earns this argument with her own evidence. A relationship in her life — one defined by abusive control, shaming, and bullying — eventually shattered, and the fallout took years to clear. She still battles cynicism she can't fully shake. The lesson she draws is not that she should have endured it better. It's the opposite: she should have walked years earlier. The damage was real and cumulative, and every month of misplaced loyalty added to the tab.

For the relationships you genuinely cannot exit — the boss, the difficult parent, the child wired for intensity — the tools are different. Start by asking what this person is afraid of losing, not what they should stop doing. What history produced this behavior? Understanding someone's triggers doesn't excuse the behavior, but it cushions the impact and makes patience structurally possible rather than heroic.

The boundary principle is where Hatmaker gets precise. A real boundary is about what you will do, not what the other person must stop doing. You cannot control people, which is enormously annoying and also simply true. So the boundary isn't 'you need to stop screaming.' It's 'you can be as angry as you want in your room, and we'll talk when you're calm.' The consequence lands on the offender rather than the offended. That rebalancing is the mechanism by which people actually change — consequences are the teacher. Absorbing the damage for them robs everyone of the lesson, including them.

Women Are Already Approved — The Work of the Cross Didn't Leave a Footnote

Picture this: someone pays your debt in full, hands you a receipt stamped 'paid in full,' and you keep sending apology checks anyway. The cross, Hatmaker argues, issued exactly that receipt — and it did not include a footnote exempting women. Acts 10:15 puts it with almost comic directness: do not call impure what God has already declared clean. That's not a complicated sentence. The approval was issued. The invitation was already extended.

The 'less-than' message most women carry isn't theological — it's cultural, passed down through institutions that used scripture as a ceiling rather than a launching pad. The New Testament Hatmaker reads shows women prophesying, teaching, and building the early church alongside men. Romans 12 lists the spiritual gifts — prophecy, teaching, leadership, encouragement, mercy — without a gender column.

Start with the women who held Hatmaker's childhood together: trading off childcare, peeling crawfish, sixty years of card games, the whole informal economy of women keeping a community breathing. They were already doing a kind of math they never named. Here's the math: for every dollar a woman earns, roughly eighty cents goes toward her family's health and wellbeing. For men, it's about thirty. Women's leadership isn't a progressive talking point — it's how communities stay alive. Those women already knew this. The numbers just confirm it.

The emotional destination here isn't individual triumph — no solitary woman crossing a finish line with her fist raised. It's something quieter and more durable: a whole generation of women who've stopped competing with each other's highlight reels and started lifting from underneath. The vision Hatmaker lands on is a crowded heaven, millions of people loved by these particular hands, and a benediction that swaps solemnity for something warmer — something like: well done, and also, you were genuinely fun to watch. That's the finish line. Run toward it.

The Return at Sunset

Here is what Hatmaker leaves you with, and it's worth sitting with: she keeps chickens, and every evening, no matter how far they've ranged — fence-walkers, car-climbers, birds who spent the whole day doing their own highly specific thing — they come home wing-to-wing to roost. Nobody had to be everywhere. Nobody had to be everything. And yet the return is possible, and the return is together.

That's the whole book in a single image. You were never meant to perform your way into belonging. The cross didn't leave a footnote, the calling doesn't require a platform, and the community doesn't need a program — just a table and someone honest enough to show up. Do the thing in front of you. Come home when the day is done. There's room on the roost.