an unnecessary letter of love

Dear you,These are the long days, aren't they? These ones at the beginning of another month of winter, whatever the groundhog says with his ancient conversation partner, the shadow. This year, I don't know what he told us. It was a Sunday and I was late for church, and I arrived in this half breathing whirlwind clutching car keys but wondering if I had remembered to drive with my license in my wallet. I know you must have those days too, days of too much forgetting, days that you tell the wall that it cannot go on like this as you throw clean socks into a dirty laundry basket just so that you can see the floor again.I don't know what made me think of it tonight, maybe the feeling that this blog was always supposed to be about love, and the lingering squint-eyed gaze in the dance studio mirror tonight at my hip shaking body made me realize it had been a while since I offered some love unbidden and unnecessary and unbounded by a reason.I'm playing Nashville Cast music on Spotify right now. I'm singing it to the screen as I type. This, too, unbidden and unbounded.We don't spend our words on each other enough. I'm so sad about that, when I let myself. I'm so sad that there are millions of words flung into the ecosystem of us and not nearly enough of them have been about this work of loving each other. Not nearly enough for you. We've spent ourselves on the theology on the policy on the philosophy on the worry on the big church and the small and the medium-sized and what we think and must think and should not think about it all. We've spent words like water on all the ideas, thin bridges in the storm, stretched across the miles.What do I even think the work is? But there I go, almost writing about what I think about the work, almost spending more words trying to describe what I want the work to be or how I think maybe this letter is the work. I don't really know, to tell you the truth. I stared in that dance studio mirror and I thought, I want to tell someone the stray thought. I want a bridge of words towards another person's heart tonight, however thin it feels against the storms. I come to the empty screen and I start to write. What do I tell you? What do I say?I'm singing "Believing." This song. I'm singing about how you keep me believing. And it's true. That simple. Writing to you keeps me near to King Jesus, as my dad has been teaching me to call him, and I'm crying while I write it and I'm trying to sing at the same time. Unbidden, and maybe only a little bounded.I don't know if you know how much I love to sing. It's the kind of love I have for writing some days, the good days, where it is the doing of it, the creation of sound and the way I imagine my voice moving through the air, how it might look or feel if you came across it. Do you have something you love that much? Would you tell me about it? Do you sing, too?I was telling you something, I think, about loving and words and this letter. But maybe, unbidden and unbounded and unnecessary though these words seem in the moment when I'm playing the song again - it's all just that loving this, the words, the hope that maybe when you read this you feel like someone saw you today and wanted you to know it, maybe that's the letter.And the love.Love,hilary