I love women.

There, I said it. It's true. I love women.

I love women who laugh and women who cry.
I love women who call me on the phone and pour out their hearts, their triumphs, their sorrows, and their tears.
I love women who are willing to do that in person.
I love women who welcome my phone calls, my complaints, and my boasting.
I love women who send me notes and cards and bookmarks via snail mail.
I love women who bake me cookies and make me granola and treat me to lunch.
I love women who allow me to back them cookies and invite them out for coffee and dinner and lunch and breakfast too.
I love women who wear white socks while sitting out on their front porches.
I love women who reach out to my children and pray for them.
I love women who are trying to raise their black sons to be strong and confident men in a country that greets them with fear and disrespect.
I love women who are raising strong daughters in a world that tries desperately to deprive them of their voices, their strength and their dignity.
I love women who are preachers and teachers and leaders in their communities.
I love women who face, fight, and overcome kanswer, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and arthritis.
I love women who don't have children and don't want children.
I love women who refuse to fit in, to conform, to be predictable.
I love women who speak the truth, even when it scares themselves and others.
I love women who are applying to grad school, to seminary, to college, to new jobs.
I love women who homeschool and women who have stopped homeschooling.
I love women who run, walk, swim, do yoga, and bike.
I love women who refuse to exercise at all.
I love women who live in houses, in apartments, in cities, and in small towns.
I love women who are transitioning from homelessness to homes of their own
I love women who decided that enough was enough and they said, "no more."
I love women who decided that enough was enough and they said, "yes."
I love women who love men.
I love women who love women.
Most of the women I love love both men and women - and I love that.
I love women in Spain, in India, in England, in Nicaragua, in Haiti, in Ecuador, in Australia, in South Africa, and all over these United States.
I love women.

Women are amazing, beautiful, strong, determined, creative, generous, loving, wise, resilient, long-suffering, kind, gracious, forgiving - except when we're not...


One of the women I have loved for a very long time died last Friday morning.
She had overcome kanswer. She had overcome pneumonia. She had overcome widowhood.
She was truly an overcomer.
But now she is gone from our sight, gone from our arms, gone on ahead to check out our next stop on the journey.
Until I see her and can love her in person again, I will love her daughter.
Te echaré mucho de menos, Marta.
Gracias por ser una mujer de mucho amor, de mucho gozo, y de mucha fé.