Kisses from Katie

Kisses From Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption, published in 2009, is a Christian memoir that follows the life of Katie Davis as she moves from the suburbs of Nashville to Uganda after high school to care for abandoned and orphaned children. This study guide refers to the 2011 First Howard Books hardcover edition.

Kisses From Katie is broken into 21 chapters that linearly tell the story of how Katie moved from Tennessee to Uganda, started a nonprofit organization, and adopted 14 young girls. Each chapter concludes with a journal entry from the accompanying moment in her life. The first chapter explores how she fell in love with the people of Uganda, while the rest of the chapters explain how she came to adopt so many little girls and start a nonprofit all at the same time.

One key theme in Katie’s story is how she’s able to love others because God first loved her. She believes that taking care of the world’s most impoverished people is what God calls us to do, and God’s love is what empowers her to act according to His will. While others look at her life and think that it’s extraordinary, she believes that she’s simply doing what God calls for in the Bible.

Although the book explores how Katie adopted so many little girls and started a nonprofit by the time she was 20 years old, it likewise focuses on the individual stories that fit into these larger narratives. Each chapter details a different moment in which Kate writes that God shows up in the midst of pain and darkness. Katie is surrounded by death, sickness, and extreme poverty in Uganda, but she remains joyful because she sees God’s love working within even the most tragic circumstances. Even by the end of her story, when one of her adopted daughters is taken away by the biological mother who abandoned her, Katie remains hopeful that she is doing God’s will and that He will see her through.