Author to speak about 'love flash mobs'

Best-selling author and blogger Glennon Doyle Melton will talk about her life at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock.
Best-selling author and blogger Glennon Doyle Melton will talk about her life at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock.

As a mother with three young children, Glennon Doyle Melton found herself overwhelmed.

At the time, she had been sober for about seven years after many years of addiction to alcohol and drugs and struggles with bulimia. When she got pregnant with her first child, she quit it all on the spot. But she was struggling to juggle life and motherhood.

"I guess I did what some moms do, which is I started to freak out a little bit," she said.

Melton said everything seemed so easy for everyone else and she wondered why it was so hard for her. She was desperate for a safe place to talk honestly about her life, so she started an online community to share her story and her worries and joys. She named it momastery.com.

"It's where I talked about all the beautiful parts of life and the brutal parts and it was just shameless and honest, and it turned out a lot of people were looking for that. It turned into this huge community and I just showed up every day and wrote," Melton said.

After one blog post attracted lots of attention, Melton found herself courted by book publishers eager to tell her story. The result was the best-seller Carry on, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life.

Melton will talk about her life at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock as part of the church's Insights series.

Melton is also the founder of a nonprofit, Together Rising, which helps people in need across the country and around the world. So far, her many fans and supporters have raised $4 million -- one $25 donation at a time. The idea started on a morning when Melton was feeling particularly grateful for her blog readers who rallied to support her book even before it was published.

"I was feeling so much gratitude for that, I decided I'm going to get on my email and help them. I'll do whatever they ask me for [in the first email]," she said.

That first email was from a woman running a home for teenage mothers in Indiana. The night before, she had to turn away a 14-year-old with a baby because there weren't enough funds to help any more girls.

"I said, 'I'll send you the money,'" Melton said, but she was not prepared for the amount needed -- $88,000. She turned to her "monkees" -- those loyal followers of her blog -- shared the story and invited people to give, with a cap set at $25 per person. They quickly raised more than $150,000.

Together Rising grew out of that experience. Since that time, Melton has organized other "love flash mobs" to help refugees, children and families. She credits her readers with the success of the nonprofit.

"I think women are so exhausted trying to be perfect all the time that when you give them the opportunity to stop all that, they have all this leftover energy and they love to give," Melton said.

She says limiting donations to $25 per person has also empowered people to help.

"That was the magic," she said. "I think people think giving is for rich people and that their small gift won't make a difference. This cap was the big equalizer."

Melton said she loves writing -- it's how she works through her own sometimes messy life , she said -- but the work of Together Rising is what she finds truly inspiring.

"That's why I love this work so much," she said. "I'm glad I can write, but so what? What is it for? It's a tool I get to use to help heal myself and others and heal the world. I'm so grateful every day."

Melton said her faith "is everything" and that she finds inspiration in the example of Jesus reaching out to the unwelcome and unworthy.

"I find the whole Jesus story to be the most compelling story I know," she said. "It's love. That's why I do everything I do. He was all about trying to find people the world had left out or that were unworthy and inviting them to the table -- not just serving them but being friends and respecting them. That's Together Rising.

"This is the way of love for me: using your gifts to reach out to hurting people and helping."

Melton has a second book titled Love Warrior slated for release in August. It's another memoir, but one much more difficult to share with the world, she said.

"This is the biggie because it's the one I'm nervous about really seeing," she said. "Two years ago, my marriage completely imploded because of infidelity on my husband's part and this one was just super, extra brutal because our kids were involved." (Their relationship would survive.)

To cope during that time, Melton continued to write as she always does, putting her feelings into words that she never expected anyone else to see.

"One day my agent said, 'How are you?' and I sent her a part of what I had been writing and said, 'This is how I am,'" Melton said. "She said, 'If you could get the courage to publish this, it would help so many people.'"

Melton said she resisted at first but changed her mind.

"I started to think about how being shameless about my recovery from addiction is really what keeps me sober. I thought if shame set me free from that, I wonder if being shameless about this marriage story could set me free also," she said. "Maybe this is a pattern for me. Love Warrior is the story. It's really a book of how I saved myself. It's the story of my fight to use crisis to fuel myself."

Melton said her talk at Trinity Episcopal will be "what I always talk about: the things we're not supposed to talk about."

"We'll laugh. We'll cry and go away feeling braver," she said.

Melton said in her talks around the country, she has seen that people experience the same hopes and dreams, and the same failures.

"The biggest gift of this for me is not the speaking and writing, it's reading and listening," she said. "My husband comes home with buckets full of letters every day and reading those letters has changed me. It's hysterical how much the same we are. They are certain that what they've done is unforgivable or no one's ever experienced it. If people only knew that there was nothing to be ashamed of, that their deepest, darkest secret is also a million people's deepest, darkest secret."

Tickets to Melton's talk are sold out, but the cathedral has a waiting list. Annie Burton, event organizer, said she's hopeful that everyone who wants to see Melton will be able to attend as some ticket holders have a change of plans and seats open up.

Information is available online at trinitylittlerock.org or by calling Burton at (501) 588-3663 or by email at annie@trinitylittlerock.org.

Religion on 04/23/2016

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