dear hilary: when you go into the woods

Dear Hilary,My question for you. I have been living in Norway for the past 4 months. I was asked to intern at a church here for 9 months, and I thought the opportunity was exactly what I had been wanting. I completed a ministry school, interned as a small group leader for a ministry school, traveled to France, Haiti and Israel and felt that I was called to the nations. With that being said, since being here there has been unexpected circumstances which lead me to feel so discouraged and confused. My heart longs to return home, and yet there is a fear of simply choosing what is comfortable rather than what is best. Currently what I had thought I would be doing I am not. My heart is aching to do what I love, and yet I feel almost stuck. I am wanting to pursue what is on His heart for me, and I feel unsure of where I am suppose to go from here. I am choosing to live present and make the most of every opportunity by serving, and doing the best with I am given but I find myself again feeling I am not doing what I truly want.Love,Feeling UnsureDear Feeling Unsure,Have you ever seen Into the Woods? The Sondheim musical, that is - there's a recent movie too, but for the purpose of this letter I'm thinking particularly of the original musical. I watched it a little while ago, and I have been thinking, and singing the soundtrack, for weeks now. And it's not a devotional in the traditional sense and it's not a Bible verse, but I can't stop thinking about it when I think about your letter.There is this song, full of things I'm not sure about, about wishes and making our own right and good, but the refrain, it's the refrain -no one is alone, truly, no one is alone.We often ask God for direction and guidance. We often crave a map, a path, a bit of light on the way. I spent months praying every day for clarity about life after college and months praying for a boy to fall in love with me when all I found was uncertainty. I spent my heart asking, asking, asking, for the clarity. For the suredness to come back (had I ever had it before?), for my way to be obvious. For the feeling in the pit of my gut that said, not this, or maybe this or worse still, I don't even know how to decide if this or if not ... to disappear.I got on the floor of my bathroom the other night while my husband made us dinner while he sang praise songs. I got on the floor and wept for no other reason than life is still confusing and I am in the woods with you, somewhere I'm not sure of, somewhere new. All after the clear calling to grad school and marriage, all after the work of it and the months of being in it and becoming familiar and even after there has been so much that has felt sure.And everywhere, there is someone who went into the woods, like you, trusting the One who calls and who now sits on her bathroom floor or in his car with the engine running, and everywhere there is a fighting to believe it: you are not alone. Truly. No one is alone. You aren't failing or falling short because your heart hurts for home. You didn't mishear a good calling, or make a wrong turn, or disappoint anyone. Hurting for home, for the familiar, for the certain path, is part of how we are made and remade and sanctified, yes, even this longing is caught up in that greater work.If you go home tomorrow, if you stay for ten years, if you long every day to go home but stay, or if you find the hurt leaves you for a little while - these are not the markers of being in the will of God. Nor are they the marker of pleasing God or living out a calling.Those things you are already doing because you are in the woods calling out for Jesus. For what is it that we are made for but to learn endlessly how deep and wide the love of Jesus, that it is finally, irrevocably true: you are not alone. Truly. You are calling out in the woods, and many miles from you, I'm doing the same, and there are thousands of us calling out, and this is the fullness of every calling: to call out for the Lord in the middle of the woods and to become more and more and more fully assured of Jesus. Believe me, Jesus hears you, loves you, and is in the middle of the woods with you.You have already done so much that is brave and breathtaking. Trust now that you can pause and ache and wonder, and go where you go, and all the while, you are not alone. Jesus goes into the woods with you, and even now, He is near.Love,hilary

dear hilary: if the impossible is true

Dear Hilary,I'm learning a lot about probabilities right now, and how to apply them. I'm learning that there are high probabilities for some things and low ones for others, based on evidence, based on prior ideas or beliefs, based on... you name it.What if there is no probability for something? What if there is no probability that God is real, the way you talk about God? Is trusting in something that isn't really trustworthy is a bad idea?Love,ProbablyDear Probably,I have a high probability for believing that I am sitting in my apartment typing this to you. I have a low probability for believing I am a brain in a vat, or secretly a monkey typing on a typewriter into infinity. I suppose lots of things are possible, but they have low probability.Honestly, though, what a curious idea - that you would measure belief by something like probability, up and weigh and judge things by how rational they are and seem. It's not a bad way of going on for some things, but it isn't the only way we measure belief. It isn't the only way we measure familiarity or trustworthiness.So maybe I wonder whether the probability of me being a brain in a vat or being a monkey typing on a typewriter to achieve Shakespeare's Hamlet is really in the end the best way to think about your questions about God.The Incarnation kind of messes around with all our probability.What is that line, from the L'Engle poem? Had Mary been filled with reason, there'd have been no room for the Child.Probability is a way of filling the room, the paper, the equation, with reason. And sometimes, when you're filled up with reason, there is no room for the Child. There is no room for the Incarnation in its particular, improbable, unyieldingly unlikely way, to live in your heart.I'm just now learning a lot about probability and probability calculus. I'm learning about how much we trust something based on what appears to us to be true or on what an authority says versus what we see, or think we see...There is a beauty to what it can show you about how you think. There is a goodness and a truth to it, too. But there is this resistant, stubborn part of my heart, or maybe the whole of my heart, that says even when it is good and helpful, it's not everything.The improbable is sometimes remarkably true. And our measure of believing in that improbable truth can't be contained in the neat lines of a pencil on a calculus problem on graph paper.Had Mary been filled with reason. Maybe this is a post about reasonable-ness, that elusive thing we so often want to defend us. We want to be justified in being angry and hurt and confused when something happens, or being elated and grateful and full of joy. We want reasonableness to keep us on the straight and narrow, give us the right opinions, protect us from being fools or from being in error. We want a hedge of protection around the happenings of the world.There'd had been no room for the Child.And isn't it the Child, after all, that we should stretch enough to make room for?And isn't it the Child, after all, that makes room for us?I want to tell you, young philosopher in the making, you who seek the probability, the justified and justifiable reasons, and even you, who might be reading this, who think that the best thing is the most probable thing -Welcome the wonder of the impossible: the Lord, come among us as a child.Let us make room.Love,hilary

dear hilary: when strength is hard-fought

Dear Hilary,He hurts. I hurt. We play the game of who cares less: He is winning because I care too much, invest my heart too quickly. Still I do not tell a soul. I wrestle with sexuality, faith, self-respect - aware that this is unhealthy. I cannot fix him, I know. And I too walk through a season of brokenness and loneliness - I am not strong enough. Tonight I ache and before I know it, I have spilled my tears and confusion and fear all over the passenger seat of my friends car. He pieces the story together and asks me if I want his advice. I nod and he tells me that I need to get out of this relationship, that I am too good for him, that he does not want to me get more hurt than I already am - that my no will hurt him, anger him, alter the relationship, but in the end, he will respect me for it. Alone in my room, I absorb his honest words. I think about what it means to respect self, declare that you are worth more than being used. I think about how it is foolish to expect that I can fix other people or be their saviour, and I know they cannot be mine either. Because the broken cannot fix the broken as the blind cannot lead the blind.Yet still I think of his arms around me. I fear that I am not strong enough to respect myself.Love,sexuality, emotions & other dangerous thingsDear Dangerous Things,I was in France my freshman year of high school when I learned the word for wound in French: blessure. We were talking about the Normandy Beaches, about D-Day. When I think about things that hurt, when I think about things that ache, for some reason I go right back to the hallway just by the gift shop in some small museum in Normandy where my teacher taught us the word for wound. Une blessure. I've since looked it up, and in the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the entry for the word "bless" is this idea - to wound or to hurt. It's from the Old French and the French. I don't know how often we use it, or if anyone uses it at all these days. But it is there, in its quiet catalogued home, and when I read your letter for some reason I went back and looked at it again.You have been blessed in just this way - injured. And your letter speaks that out and it is worth attending to. I am not anxious to speak the other meaning of the same word - the meaning that has to do with abundance, with gift, with praise, with being given a blessing. I think perhaps there will be a moment when this one blessing becomes the other, but that's not for me to say.It's just for me to say that your strength does not depend on not having been wounded. Your strength does not depend on you being in top shape all the time. Strength is a mysterious thing. You have it by clinging to it. You have it by insisting on it, daily, in the small ways. You have it not by already having it, not by being without une blessure or even more than one, but by the taking of those things into yourself.I encourage you think deeply about the conversation you had with your friend. I encourage you to attend to the parts of it that perhaps feel most wounding: that your friend has said you should alter the relationship. That your friend has said you will be more hurt by continuing. That your friend, whatever else has happened, whatever wounds live there, is telling you to go.That conversation hurts, but I think it is its hurting, its clear-sighted pain, is the strength. Because you will not have strength to go before you go, and there will be no magical moment where you wake up and the wounds have disappeared.So do not wait. Strength to go will follow your leaving. The healing will follow your binding up of the wounds.I can't know how or when or even if this wound, this blessing, will become the other kind. But I know that you will have strength to go by going, I know that you will find that in the first steps you take out from the space where you are hurting, out from attending to it, clear-sighted, there strength will meet you.For I believe that God's gesture to us is one of constant coming near. Nadia Bolz-Weber writes that in her book Pastrix - I remember underlining it over and over and over. "God is always coming near us."God is always coming near you. Constantly. In this, in the first step away, in the before-you-have-strength, in the strengthening, in the aftermath. In the blessing, and the blessing.Love,hilary

dear hilary: shun that bulls**

Dear Hilary,What do you do with the "what if's"? What do you do when you're smiling, writing him a letter, confident of the love you have for him--and then that nasty little "what if" crawls its way into the back of your skull? What do you do when you want to believe that you'll be a good wife and mother and student and friend and God-seeker-follower-lover but that "what if" comes and tells you that you will mangle and destroy and harm everything you touch and that the sin and fear you hate so utterly will tie you down and win?love,doubting thomasinaDear doubting thomasina,I try not to swear too much. It's not so much because I don't believe it's ever right but more because I want to be sure that I do so powerfully - that I name things what they are, that I respond with force to things that are forceful, vehemently to things which deserve my vehemence.And the "what ifs", my dear, are not more nor less than bullshit.Yep. I said that word, and I would say it again. The what if's, which slide up to you, glamorous, sleek, offering you a glimpse into the future, the chance to plan ahead, the chance to give you a head start on everything coming your way - they're a bad apple. A bucket of bad apples.The question, "What if this happens?" sidles up to you, and suddenly, then, it seems almost irreversibly, you're far and away down the road of worrying, convinced you've got it wrong and you look behind you and the what if is far away down the road, laughing.I believe that this is the work of darkness in the heart. I'm acquainted with this darkness. I can spin into questions about whether I am a good wife or a good student or a good anything, and from there I ask, "what if I'm not those things and I've been seriously f***ing up every part of my life from birth until now?" It grows, like shadows do at the end of the day - quickly and without warning. And, like darkness, the what if's make you lose your sense of touch, make you feel like you're waving your hand in front of you but you can't feel anything, can't be sure of anything, can't hold onto anything.Oh, how I am acquainted with this.And then there is the fluttering flag planted in your beautiful letter: What do you do?Can I call it, perhaps, how do we overcome? This is what I believe with every fiber of my being: we overcome this bs by shunning it. We gloriously slam the door in its face when it knocks, when it comes around to the side porch, we look at it, and we say "no." Say it with me. No.There is space in the wide wild kingdom of God to overcome - and it begins with no.It begins with shouting back, and I mean it, say it out loud in your room and say it out loud in your letters and say it loud in church or in the car or in the woods, speak it out:I belong to Jesus.Do you remember how Jesus showed us the picture of ourselves, trembling, vulnerable lambs, and then told us - "I am the Good Shepherd"?He said more than that. He said that his sheep know him. That we know the sound of his voice.You writing this to me tells me you know that there is something wrong with the voice of the what-if. It doesn't sound like Jesus, does it? It doesn't sound like the Good Shepherd. It doesn't sound like hope, like love, like confidence in Him through whom we are more than conquerors, through whom we are co-heirs, through whom we are raised up on the last day and never lost.The voice of the what-if is the voice of a stranger.You can call bullshit on that.You can shout-sing-cry-whisper-pray-rage it, tell it that you belong to Jesus, that you do not listen to the voice of the stranger.And then, however you can, in words or tears, in laughter or hope or something else altogether, ask Jesus to call out to you again who you already are. Ask Jesus to tell you the better story of your life, of your hope, of your wonder, of your worth. Ask Jesus, "who am I?"Hear yourself called beloved again. Then, holding onto that, shun those what-ifs.Love,hilary

dear hilary: building the gates

Dear Hilary,

You seem to be pretty guarded online, while your husband isn’t. This has me asking questions of what I, newly married myself, think about putting my life on the Internet. How do you or you and your husband think about those boundaries? So much of your own relationship, from what I have witnessed, is thanks to the Internet. So, yay Internet! But what about the danger zones or the places where you have to set boundaries?

Sincerely, Newly married and lost in the borderlands

Dear Newlywed,

I was nine years old. I was walking through fields in the south of England, by myself for the first time, on the lanes immediately surrounding my grandparents' house. In England, when you come to a break in the path and it continues onto someone's pasture, there is a high gate that you usually have to climb up a few steps, unhook the gate from the other side, climb over and then rehook the gate after you.

I thought I could scale the fence.

In my purple (probably stolen) sweater and boots that were a little too big for me and these polka dot leggings and let me tell you there were also ruffles on my socks. It was a complete outfit - there I was, trying to clamber up over the fence without any pretense.

It didn't go that well. I got caught on part of the fence and I came dangerously close to ripping said sweater and came very near to losing my balance into a ripe pile of mud and cow pie. I finally gave in and pushed up the heavy iron ring that keeps one post of the fence closed against the other, and proceeded down the other side and on my way to the playground.

What is it about fences?

We try so hard to scale them, Newlywed. We try to be the confidant, the one who is in the know, the person with the most in-depth analysis and interpretation and information. And in a world where so much information is available, is possible to find and have and be the possessor of, I think we take to scaling fences.

It's not all bad. It's not all out of malice or wrong intent. Often I think we find something we love and so, in our eagerness, seek to know everything we can about it. And we usually don't stop long enough to think about whether or not it's something we ought to know.

And in the world of the internet, where a Google search can find you someone's high school photos, it's so easy to start wandering through the middle of the field without thinking too much about where we are walking.

And so my husband and I have worked on our fences. We sat down on car rides or lazy afternoons on the porch while the fall wind ruffled the trees and hammered out where the gates would be. Our blogs - what kind of path of our life did they open to the general public? What kind of personal details do we include in our storytelling along the way? What about Facebook, or Instagram or Twitter?

And we built them slow, and we build them still in the midst of learning about each other, because marriages are living things and so when we meet something new, we ask ourselves: what should go through the gate? What shouldn't? What can shed light and laughter along someone's walk in the woods and what is just ours?

We met because we are writers, because we love the way words sound and feel on a page, because of the ache and promise of them. But for every word that's in the public binary code turned HTML turned text you read on your iPhone screen, there is more to it. There are the thousand things unspoken between us, there are the things spoken only in the whispers across the couch or the front seats of the car, there are the things we remember with and for each other that we keep to ourselves.

The beautiful thing about building fences and gates is that the gate is the gesture of welcome, the fence the gesture of protection, and those two things - welcome, and protection - live together in harmony. Building one doesn't mean that you need to abandon the other.

We need each other's stories along this long and winding road. And we need each other's fences to protect for each other the things that should belong only to a few.

So, Newlywedded, I don't think you're lost in the borderlands: I think you're right where you are, in your plot of land, and you've got some timber and some time with your spouse. Start to build.

We'll love the paths you make for us to walk around in.

Love,hilary

dear hilary: talk to me

Dear Hilary, Finishing up my Freshmen year of college, I have found these last months to be consumed with the desire to fullfill a definition of beautiful and be the sort of person a boy would desire. Everyone around me seems to be speaking of identity and verses are continuing to declare God's love and claim of worthiness on my life. Yet, I find my self so deeply desperate for the affection of a boy, for a romantic relationship. I have never had a boyfriend and I feel like I have no one pursing me in that way. So I'm really wondering, is it okay to dream of this man? Because I used to believe that God had that man for me, it was just a matter of waiting and loving him first. But now I wonder, that perhaps I am called to that single life or an early death or to not finding that guy until I'm in my 30s or to marry someone that is not like the man I have dreamed of. I just don't feel like I am worthy of being loved in that sort of way or if it is even fair of me to dream of such a guy. How do I approach the Lord in prayer when I don't even know if there is a guy? And can I dream of a guy with particular qualities or is that un-christ like and foolish because the only thing I should look for in a partner is his love for Christ?Love,Just AskingDear Just Asking,I was driving home one weekend from college, in the midst of thinking about and wondering about this one guy who was in my microeconomics class. We sat next to each other, we passed notes about where the supply and demand lines met in the graph and whether that always determined the price. We occasionally saw each other outside the regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday clock. It's funny how you can find yourself in a rhythm of thinking just like the other rhythms of your life. 4:30 on those days saw me turning my thoughts to the what if we dated and the why doesn't he ask me out? and the ever-present am I worth that? There is a certain kind of ache in the rhythm, a certain all-too-familiar. I would overthink what I was going to wear to class that day, I would write those notes in the margins of my notebook and I would walk back to my dorm wondering everything you are wondering, about love and the person and whether Jesus was going to get around to giving me a person anytime soon.And I could write a lot about how this remembering is a work of conviction in the heart but also the practice of grace, the realizing that our past selves are not to be condemned as the worst possible versions of ourselves, but to be loved and accepted as being the people that they were, knowing what they knew... but that is a different story.I am driving home. That's where we are. I am driving home and I am turning left, sneaking around the bend in the road a little fast than I should, and as I swung the car through the turn I found myself saying, "God, what is the deal?"And God said, "I see you've decided to talk to Me."I promptly started to cry. I drove and cried and talked, spilled out the story into the empty car which is not empty because God and I are finally, really, talking. I said everything, the notes, the protests that what if I was not worthy, the questions about if he was ever going to ask me out. I said it, spoke it into being.And that was the beginning of the change for me. Not when the boy dated someone else, or when the other boy and I ended things, or when Preston and I got together. The beginning of the change was this drive home, the fall whispering through the trees, promising winter, promising, further on, spring.God, what is the deal? We do not always begin in a glamourous, beautiful, prayer. We do not always begin in the right words. But if we begin, then we begin. If we are willing to say something to God, then we open our hearts to be changed, to be molded, to be made more.I will not tell you whether you should desire specific qualities in a guy or not, dear one - because I do not believe it is wrong to ask and imagine. I believe only that it is more dangerous when you are not honest with God. I mean gut-wrenchingly honest. I mean on your knees honest. I mean with your Bible open and your pen raging across the pages of God's promises honest. I want you to get real with God so that you can get quiet and hear God.We hear so many times that we should make our worthiness not about guys. Oh, have I heard this and preached this in the coffee shops and along the sidewalks. But can I tell you, across the wires of the Internet, something?I think God is more willing to tell us our worthiness without us trying to make ourselves believe it without Him. I think God wants to tell you you are worthy. I think God wants you to get alone, to get rage-y, to get serious, to ask the question. I ask it, still. Only when we are willing to ask God, who alone can answer our questions with the fullness of His life, can we begin to feel the life moving in us.The point of your life and my life and all the lives that scatter this beautiful world - the point is the real conversation with God. Not whether he wants you to love him before he gives you a guy. Not whether you'll have an early death or be like Paul or find love in college or work 10 jobs or 1. Not whether you are a poet or a preacher or a physical plant manager.The point is always Jesus, looking at us, looking at you, in the beautiful singularity that you are, and saying, "Talk to me." When we start talking, and only then, do we start to make our hearts able to hear God. About boys. About college. About love. About worthiness. About the aches wrapping around our hearts."Talk to me." This, my dear friend, this is our invitation.Love,hilary

dear hilary: that impossible brightness

Dear Hilary,My question concerns (as most questions seem to) fear and love. For a long time, I was afraid to love, and then I was brave and fell deep into it, and then what I was most afraid of happened: I was too much, or I wasn't enough. The end of it was confusing and tangled and I got hurt again and again, but I held on, thinking that I wanted to show him grace and love and forgiveness. The problem is, I didn't show any of those things to myself, and now I'm so embarrassed and afraid of how hurt I got, how long I held on, and how badly I was willing to be treated. The question is, how do I forgive myself for that? How do I move through the fear of love ending and fall in love again, now that I know how the ending burns? How do I get over the fear of never falling in love again, which is partly what motivated me to hold on to the love I found for so long after it hurt me?Love,The Edge of HopeDear The Edge,"It is not the critic who counts." Can I ask you to go look this up? I won't say more, but I will say click beyond Goodreads, beyond the quote itself (I'll give it away - it's Teddy Roosevelt), and down towards the bottom will be this name, Brene Brown, and if I say nothing to you in this, it's just that you remind me of her mantra. This letter, this act of describing your question, this being willing to be you here in this space - that is what she calls daring greatly.Today all I can think about is this time that Preston asked me something that flipped me upside down. "Are you," he said, pausing over the words and over the rim of his mug (we were sitting in the living room), "always this unkind to yourself?" We were drinking coffee and going through my applications to graduate school and I was telling him with a lot of confidence that I was NOT going to get in and I should NEVER try and I should just quit and not be a philosopher or anything because everyone would find out I was a fraud and... then he asked that question. "Are you always this unkind to yourself?"I got mad. I don't really know why. Maybe because the truth doesn't set you free before it royally pisses you off and arrives at the most inconvenient time and screw up all the plans you had for avoiding it. I hated the question, though, for what it pointed to in me: that my unkindness wasn't towards others in that instance. It was towards me. It was shame and regret and hurt I piled on and on as a way to protect myself from potentially being rejected. "Who am I to apply to school X? Smart people apply there" or "Who am I to have loved so wildly? Only fools don't realize what it costs..." or my personal favorite, "Who do I think I am to be enjoying such a good life? It won't last!"  Unkindness asks that question, tries to protect us in a cocoon of doubt and embarrassment, tries to keep us from making what we think will be a mistake.The cocoon is not where it is at. I mean, we all go there, we all build one, but maybe specifically here, when it comes to love and fear, I want to put up a big warning sign that says, BE KIND TO YOURSELF. I want to stamp it across every sign you see today. You do not need a cocoon of doubt or fear or embarrassment or shame. Because actually, in fact, I believe you are already stronger than the cocoon. I believe you are stronger without it.Here, in love, the critic in you does not count. At all. In any way. You loved, and it ended, and it was terrifying and beautiful and tangled and ugly and hurt like hell and probably still does on some mornings (I have those days too). But the forgiving of yourself begins in a kindness to yourself. A basic, gut level kindness. A kindness that says, "I dared greatly. And now it hurts." A kindness that says, "I was brave. I believed in love. It disappointed me that time." A kindness that does not hide the truth - the real truth - which is not that you should be embarrassed or ashamed of loving, but the truth which is that you dared and even so it is complicated, and no blame or unkindness will clarify that paradox.There is an impossible brightness to love: that paradox of daring and fear, of deep connection and also things not working out every time. That kind of love, falling in it, falling out of it, that is where you tell me you learned things about grace and forgiveness and love. I believe you did learn about those things. I believe now is the time to hold them in your hands and offer them back to yourself, not as warning for what not to do, not as judgment for how long you stayed or what you were or were not willing to do for this person, but as the gifts of that time. As the gifts of daring greatly. As the gifts of the impossible brightness of love.You are already out here in the brightness, love. You don't need the cocoon. You're far too strong.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the edge of your hope

Dear Hilary,I am a recent college graduate, unemployed for five months, living in my parents’ house and watching as my hopes for graduate school disappear as the letters come back. I’ve lived through several tragedies in the past several years -- murder, abuse, relationships broken up. I feel as if I am suspended in motion, watching my friends get married, have kids and buy houses – and I wish they had what they have. How do I have hope in the Lord when I am continually disappointed with what happens in my life? Is it wrong to want to be happy?Sincerely,Afraid to hopeDear Afraid to hope,Every time I read your letter, I start to think. I think about you, writing away at your computer somewhere. I think about the way you crafted your story, your question, and what you might have been doing while you wrote it. I think about how courageous you are to write it down at all, because writing makes things a different kind of real. I think about whether you'd drink a latte or something without caffeine in it, if we went out to coffee together.And your question? There is no pithy quote on this wide and wildly beautiful world that would capture an answer to it. Because you want to know about a living thing - hope - and living things are never as simple as those handpainted lettered signs on the Pinterest page. You want to know about a thing that moves with us, that spills over into the most surprising corners, that feels at once impossible and utterly, undeniably, real.After I read your question the first few times, I did yoga. I am not great at yoga, so I picked the "easy yoga for beginners" (because that can't be that hard, right?) on amazon and I started. The first thing we did was lie down. I almost turned the video off and muttered something dismissive about the idea that lying down is a kind of exercise, but for some reason I stayed. I closed my eyes, the way the all-too-peaceful instructor told me to. I willed myself to be calm. That hardly ever works for me, because my heart starts racing and I think of my to-do lists and then before I know it I'm already missing half the warrior pose. But that too peaceful instructor, she said something that made its way into the maze of my racing heart and mind. She asked, "Where is your body right now? Honor what your body is telling you. Honor what your body can do today."I think there is this part of us all that secretly believes everything important happens in our heads. The disappointments and the hurts and the joys and the wondering, that's all work internal, in that life of the mind, in that wild wandering heart space. And we think that space is, must be, infinite, able to do whatever we tell it to. We think we can think our way or feel our way or demand our way into hope or faith or love. We think we can order the heart space around, tell it to expand, tell it to get wiser - tell it to memorize Pinterest quotes - tell it to have hope in the Lord.And that's where I think we go wrong.We are just one: body and heart and mind all tangled together. We can no more say to our minds or hearts that we can be more hopeful or less disappointed than we can tell our bodies to sink deeper into Warrior II or arch our backs higher in Cobra. "Honor what your body can do today."You have to start testing the edges of your hope. You have to get real with God and with yourself and ask, "Where are you today, body and heart and mind? Where are we with this lived thing, hope?" And sink a little deeper, and honor where you are today. Explore it. Ask God all the things you think you can't ask because you think if you ask you won't get closer to hope. I mean the gritty questions: I mean the "Why is this happening to me?" and the "Wasn't I faithful to you?" and the often-lurking-for-me-anyway "Do you love me? How can you love me when this is what I see?"Afraid to hope, I am here to tell you hope is hard won, body and spirit jumbled together. It is a tested thing, it is a thing that lives. And this is the greatest gift to us. Because it means that when we honor where we are today, we inch towards more strength tomorrow. When we honor the conversation we are really having with God today, we move towards a new conversation tomorrow.It isn't wrong to want to be happy, by the way, but I don't think what you're after here is an answer to that. I think you're after the bigger thing - the hope, the hope that is beyond the optimism we associate with happiness, or with achieving the things we want. You want the bigger thing, the hope. I love that about your letter. I love that you ask such a big question. How courageous you are.So now, I will ask you to be courageous again: go forward, body, mind, heart as one, and test the edges of your hope. Bang down the door to God, be loud, ask yourself where you are today. Sink a little deeper into the stretch of hope, the stretch of this wild thing that is you and God. Tomorrow, I promise you, hope grows.Love,hilary

dear hilary: make an invitation

Dear Hilary,I'm here. I made it to college and somehow surviving on my own. I love these people and the opportunities I get and almost everything this place has to offer---but this week especially, I've been so afraid. Of everything. I'm afraid that there will be no one to catch me, that I'm destined for life as an outcast. I have people here who care, but they have their own lives and somewhere they belong. They have their own friendships, and even my roommate knows so many more people than I do, I just don't know how to ask for help---but I want it, but I'm so afraid of being in the way.There are so many deep friendships here, and it's beautiful to watch, and I don't want to be jealous, but maybe I am. And maybe I'm starting to wonder ifI'm not worth knowing that deeply, that I'm destined to be on the outskirts. I just don't see where I fit here. I'm too scared to do much of anything.Love,FreshmanDear Freshman,I almost transferred my first semester of college. Between the chaos of having chosen a major and suddenly wanting to switch it, living with a stranger, moving from my small, tight-knit circle of friends in high school to this bigger pond where people seemed to know each other after three minutes during the Orientation games or the day trip into Boston, I didn't think I could make it. I walked around with my old high school backpack, sat in my classes or in the dining hall, and imagined what it would be like to start over. Or better yet, to stop starting over. To spend the rest of my time in a familiar place with familiar people.I want so achingly ready to be done. And so I hear that same worry and frustration in your letter, and I want to tell you, the way that I seem to write in most of these letters, that it is not wrong to ache with the transition into college. It is not wrong to be unsure of yourself in a new place and unsure of the people who are with you. These feelings belong to you, and they are part of you, and they are part of the story of you in college. It is okay to let them exist in their loud, clattering selves for a little while.What kept me at the school I eventually grew to love was a woman with a piece of zucchini bread. Yes, that simple. That seemingly small. She called one of those first few weeks in and told me that her mom had sent her zucchini bread in a care package, that she couldn't possibly eat it all herself, so what did I think about coming over and having tea?I remember thinking at the time it was the first planned thing I had had in college so far. An RD and her zucchini bread in her apartment on a Friday afternoon. It sounds so simple. It sounds like it wouldn't be very much compared with the friendships that seem to multiply every night, that make the lounge loud and impossible to study in, that crowd the dining hall and the library and the walkways on your way to class.But I think it's more powerful than that.Belonging is not measured by the number of people at your table at dinner, and by what you think your roommate is doing, or how well they fit in, or if it seems like your whole first year seminar is throwing parties on the weekends. My guess is, honestly, that most of them feel the same way. It'll show differently in each of us, but I promise that they are also wondering about how to belong and if they will fit and whether anyone is really willing to get to know them beyond the customary exchanges of "hi" and "how are you" (to which your response has to be "good", though I have no idea why we came up with that). They wonder if you'll see them, just as you wonder if they will.So you want to know what you can do, to bridge these gaps, to feel less afraid. Bake zucchini bread. Invite someone from a class to eat it with you. Invite your roommate to go to the grocery store with you because you'd like the company and it's a chance to get off-campus. Invite these people who right now seem to have it together into a space that you make, a space that you're creating in and among everything that is new and overwhelming.There are more rarely moments when we "see how we fit" and more often moments when we help others fit into something new with us. You are already brave enough to ask these questions out loud to me. So I know you are brave enough to google a recipe for something that you love and bake it and bring others in to share it with you.That first invitation will be more meaningful than you know.Love,hilary

dear hilary: stay at the table

This is a new kind of dear hilary question - but one that I care a lot about, and I'm excited to share.Dear Hilary,As Christians, what, if anything, do we stand to gain from political disputes?  Should we just throw up our hands and agree to disagree, even on emotionally charged issues that matter deeply to us?  Or should we dive in headfirst and fight the good fight, even when it starts to poison our relationships and hurt our ability to love those with whom we disagree?Or is there a third option?Sincerely, Swing State of MindDear Swing State,When I lived in the bright chaos of DC, I remember wondering how people "did it" without losing their minds. The mantra of "it's who you know, it's the connections you have," or the walk along K Street with the power houses and the promise-makers-and-breakers was a lot to take in. And it seemed like the longer I spent time there, the more I realized the immense complexity of political life. The process of getting a bill to the floor alone is long enough and complicated enough to want to throw up your hands. And sometimes, when you hear one more report on the 7 o'clock news or one more newspaper headline about gridlock and insider Washington and the stalemate of government and this or that filibuster fight - you think this can't be what it is meant to be. And I don't think it is. I don't think we are intended to sit at tables and yell at each other over nicely arranged water pitchers and smoothly swiveling chairs. I don't think political conversation is meant to be so defensive and so positional that everything we hear the so-called "other side" saying we treat as an attack we must vigilantly rebuff.But here is the thing. A conversation only dissolves when people leave it. It might be a loud cacophony right now, it might sound like chaos, it might make us want to give up - but it still has life in it. If we withdraw, if we become so dissatisfied that we simply cease to participate, we might send a signal of our dissatisfaction, but we won't have a better conversation. We won't get to be agents of that change.I don't want Christians to be in politics simply because we represent an important philosophical perspective on matters of political and community significance. That's true. We care a lot about highly charged issues and our reflections can add a lot to policy-making. I want us to be there because we are fundamentally people of peace and justice. I want us to be there because, if we claim Christ, then we claim a kind of approach to politics, to conversations, to decisions about our common life, with the fiercest kind of commitment to listening. Peacemaking has to begin with listening. Justice has to begin with listening. If we leave the table, how will we hear?That means if we sit at the table, if we model for others and for each other (because we need that, too) we can make the conversation itself, the very way we go about deciding these things and weighing different opinions, one that is peaceful rather than punishing. We can ask questions and sincerely listen. And yes, maybe the philosophical opinion on one policy issue won't become law the way that some of us in this wild knit-together family wanted. Maybe it will be less than our original vision.But we can be a people who don't retreat into a silo of the like-minded. We can be a people who disagree within themselves, but who know that to do this common life, we have to listen. You say that sometimes our opinions hurt our relationships and makes it difficult to love those with whom we disagree? But whether it's in politics or families or workplaces or third-grade classrooms this was the charge we were given by Christ. We were told to love. So we have to get down in the dirt with each other and practice it. Couldn't it be, in fact, that participating in this political life is a part of how we learn to love?Can we imagine together that this politics thing doesn't have to be fighting the good fight and hurting those we love? We do that no matter what, so we'll bring it to politics. But can we imagine that politics could be the kind of chasing after justice with our whole participation at the table, disagreeing with care and attention, being the first to stay at the table when it gets difficult, being a people who listen?If we leave the table, how will we hear? Love,hilary

dear hilary: the weight of all things

Dear Hilary,

My engagement has come to an end. I am devastated. The life that I thought I had, my direction, my focus, my plans for the future with this person that I so loved, have come to an end. There is no hope of return. I feel so lost. Where do I find God in this, when I feel so abandoned? When all the things I thought were promised for us are now dust? How can I even begin to figure out what is next for me? Please help,

Love,Lost in nowhere

Dear Lost in nowhere,Oh my dear. I am so completely, utterly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Your letter goes right to my gut when I read it, revisit it, looking for a way to reach through these electric cables and wi-fi signals and tell you that I am aching for you. And I do not understand how it hurts. But in the midst of the terrible mystery of it, and not understanding it, I wanted to reach over and whisper how very, very sorry I am.Rilke once said, "Life is heavier than the weight of all things." I wondered at that when I first read it. It seems obvious, somehow, that life is heavy, heavier. But then I thought about how we calculate ourselves into knots. How we try to add up the heaviness to understand when we will heal. How we try to understand how much time will take to grow, to move, to be made whole when something becomes, as you say, dust. But time is not obedient to those calculations, and neither is grief, and neither is ache. So Rilke is right, and his counsel is what I want to give you: Life is heavier than the weight of all things.You are in the unmeasurable heaviness, in a dark tunnel and right now, I do not want you to strain for light. We blind ourselves when we pretend we push ourselves to make meaning of it too soon. If the tunnel is dark, and there is no light to be seen, do not rush to see what and where and how and why. I'd so much rather you rage and get quiet and get loud and cry and then, stop, and then start again, at the pace and in the way that you must. Your body will tell you how to do this. It is okay to listen to it for a while. It is okay to feel the heaviness in your throat and your heart.Do not rush to see where God might be going or where He is leading you, or where He will take you next. For though these things have a life, and they do, God does not ask you to see that before He gives you the light to see it by. In the unmeasurable heaviness, in the dark tunnel - He is not asking that of you.I could tell you I think God is outside the tunnel waiting for you (He is, in a way, but that's not the answer). I could tell you that He is next to you in the heaviness and the anchoring ache behind your heart that feels like a constant catch in your throat (He is there, too). But when we ask where God is, it is hard to know how to measure that. Could I whisper to you instead something about who God is?God is the faithful.This is not a faithful that means there is a "greater purpose" or a "meaning you just can't see yet." I call bullshit on that in this moment, because God's faithfulness is not about that. It is about a promise to dwell in and among us. To be Emmanuel. To be walking in our midst and to draw near when we cry out. God's faithfulness is a promise of nearness.So when you cry out, "WHERE ARE YOU?" in your room and in your car and in your office and when you ache with others or by yourself and in the unmeasurable heaviness, in the life heavier than the weight of each thing you wonder,you cry out to one who is faithful.You cry out to one who made love manifest in a body, and that One who took on our flesh took on our heaviness took into himself all that we carry and all that we cannot carry. You cry out the truth - that this is a devastating thing, a thing that should not have been, and your cry will reach him. Your cry - if it is anger and sadness and the weight of all things and confusion, just as you wrote to me -Ask him where he is. Ask him to show himself to you, in the weight of all things and the heaviness beyond it. Your cry will reach him.Love, always,hilary

dear hilary: call out

Dear Hilary,What makes a calling big (and none of this bullshit about how we are all called to big things and I should just be thankful for the thousands of gifts I have right now)? Real talk: what does it mean to be called?Love,Over ItDear Over It,So, you want to real talk. We can real talk. We can sit down here, in this space - let me buy you a cup of coffee (dry cappuccino or mocha something or cider, if you want to feel like fall) - and we can real talk.I could look up calling in the dictionary and talk about the sense of desire for work. But you'd probably see through that, right? Tell me that anyone can look up and parse a definition?I could tell you the lilting words of the many wise writers that calling is about the sense of doing what you cannot not do, that it is about gladness meeting need, that the world and you meet in a field somewhere, literal or metaphorical or imagined, and hash it out, and you emerge with a sense that you have purpose. But from what you ask me, from the way your question sounded when I first read it, you'd ask for more than that, too, right? You want something else. You want more.Here is more: you aren't supposed to fake a contentment in your life just because others appear to have found it. On the road to the unfolding of your calling there is nothing more problematic than trying to pretend you have found it before you have, to tell yourself the lie that this is all you have been given so you better sit down and play at peace and joy because you won't get anything else. Peace and joy aren't playthings. They're things you hunger after with your whole heart and mind and body and things you fight for (and sometimes with) and the thing I want to tell you is that you cannot fake your way to a calling.So why don't you wrestle?Why don't you hang on with your limbs and stray thoughts tangled together, with everything you have, to the question what is my calling? Why aren't you fighting harder for a way through the thicket, or standing at the edge of things and shouting that you want to know where God is and where He is going, that you are tired of living in the pretend of "already-finding-contentment" because that's not gratitude, really, is it? We both know that. We both know that it is better to go out and holler in a field that there is nothing you know right now than to sit on the concrete sidewalk and be wounded by what you haven't actually wrestled with.Peace and joy more often arrive fiery. Peace and joy aren't pretty feelings, they're movements in and around you. Contentment is about a stillness that comes both without and within, about a listening to God, about a listening to yourself. Your letter to me tells me that you haven't shouted much about it. And we are both like this. I cup the questions of big calling or wild calling in my hands and run in the woods with them, careful like I'm holding a baby bird that will break. But the question isn't fragile. And God is not.And the truth is, I am not, either.We are both wild and brave enough to face the question of a big calling, without the comfort of trying to make ourselves content with what we see. We are both brave enough to launch out and say, "THIS I LOVE" or "THIS I CHERISH" or "THIS, THIS, GOD, DO YOU SEE ME?" and wait for an answer.It is a long story in the Bible of people who strive with God, who go out into the field to yell and holler and ask.You have to do that before you can get still enough to hear an answer. And being called?Maybe for us, maybe for you, it means actually more about how you are calling out to God and asking to be called back to. Maybe it is about the sound of your voice meeting the Word, being silenced and changed by it. Maybe rather than worrying that you have or don't have a big calling, or what it even means (because I doubt anyone can tell you the feeling or the way you know or the kind of thing that it is)you can call out -Do you see me? And hold that up, and hear.Love,hilary

dear hilary: go more gently

Dear Hilary,

I am lost, here in this new place.  The person I thought I was, the Christ I believed I followed, the people I learned to trust, lie now in a hopeless heap of feeling-wholly-helpless, and I continue on, digging my grave among the ruins.  This unknown, this not being known, scares me silly.  And when I am with the one who wants to know me?  My goody two shoes and those giant red flags scream at me, telling me to guard my heart because his heart doesn't belong to Jesus.  But right now, I just hardly seem to care.  Help?

Love,Fearful-in-a-Philly-Place

Dear Fearful,The scene: February (why do things always seem to happen in February?). A Starbucks table, the kind not really big enough for two people so you're crammed together, holding your drinks, each allowed one elbow on the table. It's early afternoon, I think, and I look harried and there are creases in my collared shirt because I don't really want to bother ironing it (truth be told, to this day I'm not great with an iron). I hold a mostly-empty cup, toss it back and forth in my hands. I have everything and nothing to say.Let's be simple about it: I had no idea where God was and I wasn't really sure where to start looking. I was scared out of my mind and I didn't want anything to change and I wanted everything to change. And I was so tired I didn't know if I could physically worry any more. And now, I read your words and they stay with me, I think about them and I think about you, and I imagine us in a Starbucks somewhere, October instead of February, at some cramped table tossing our cups back and forth in our hands. Thank you for your sincerity. For being brave enough to say it, that where you are is lost, that where you are is unsure. I hope you know how brave you are.Building in this life can't begin somewhere less than your courage.You say you're digging a grave among the ruins, but I think you can be a bit kinder to yourself here. Yes, the not-being-known, yes, the unknown, yes, the being lost in the forest of your faith and how it is moving and changing, yes, that is real. But I don't think it's ruinous and I don't think you're digging a grave. I think you're in a giant heap of questions and the pinpricks of light between them don't feel like enough to be guided by. It applies across the board, every time you come to a new question - what do I do about the feeling of being unknown? What do I do about the person I thought I was? What about Christ? What about the boy? - everywhere you look, the question looks bigger and the agony of not knowing the answer grows bigger, too.You're in this giant pile of questions and you're turning around and around inside them, and with all that movement, it's hard to see anything.Go more gently.In the year of February meltdown in Starbucks, I took a ballet class. I learned quickly that I was not as flexible as I thought I was.  And I would get into trouble if I tried too hard to get there faster - to get to a perfect arabesque at the barre, to get to a pique turn with the right releve. I couldn't do any of it when I tried to do it all at once. How ordinary, the need to slow down. And how true. In ballet, like in the deepest spiritual and emotional questions, we must be gentle. We must be willing to submit to a gentler pace that leaves us longer in the uncertainty, longer in some of the fear, longer, even, in some of what is hardest.What does this mean for you? I think it means you should stand still for five minutes and watch yourself breathe. I think it means you should go for a walk outside and yell everything you think you're not allowed to yell at God at God, tell Him about the boy, tell Him about who you thought He was and who you thought you were. I think you then get really quiet with God and ask Him He is. Don't ask yourself to hear or understand what He might say or not say. But ask that. Leave the question aloud in the night. Return to it, see how it changes.And as for guarding your heart and the red flags around the boy? I have a lot of thoughts about it, but most truthfully, Fearful, I think the pinpricks of light around those questions will grow as you watch yourself breathe and talk to God and get really quiet. You care more about this than you first told me. Why else could you have put words to it? Guarding your heart is about so much more than the particulars of this person who knows you, who wants to know you, who you care about - it is about all the questions in the heap of questions. It is about being gentler with yourself. You will know more about where your heart is when it comes to this other person when you're gentler with your heart, period. If anything, I want you to release yourself from the expectation that you can know what guarding your heart looks like perfectly now. It's so much more important to me that you are gentler with yourself. It's more important to me that you get those five minutes in the miracle of breathing and that walk in the woods (or in the park, or wherever it makes the most sense for you to go).And, just as gently, I believe the light will grow.Love,hilary

it is about being seen

I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this. I repeat it over and over to myself, sinking into the scratchy wool chair in the downstairs lobby. I'm here because my parents tell me I need to talk to someone, need to walk through the perfectionism, need to admit the things I don't want to admit - I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this. I look around - the water in its bulky upside down Poland Springs dispenser, the packets of Swiss Miss, the old copies of Martha Stewart Living or Bon Appetit, which I flip through foolishly (I barely cook anything) as I wait. Pumpkin sage ravioli. Pumpkin chocolate cookies. Something with cinnamon that sounds beautiful and impossible. I toss the magazines aside and move my feet around the edges of my chair.I don't need this - isn't this for those who really struggle, not for 19 year olds with perfectionist tendencies and maybe some insecurities but nothing major, nothing she can't get a handle on if she would only try harder and shape up and be better?I don't need this - it was just one or two comments to my parents about feeling not good enough or that I was a bad friend and a failure.I don't need this - I'm Hilary. Hilary is put together. Hilary doesn't need to go to counseling.She comes downstairs to get me for the appointment and I walk quietly behind her.Her couch is softer than the chair downstairs, and the office is quiet, and there are paper cups for the hot tea I know she must offer or make for most of the people who come through in a day, in a week. I see the rain on the glass panes of the window behind her chair, and though I am afraid, though I worry, though I think in my head still, I don't need this - something in her smiles tells me it is okay to keep talking.She asks me questions no one has asked before - asks me to tell her all about what I think to myself as I walk through a day, asks me to tell her about school, and how I perform, asks me to tell her about my stray thoughts and my someday dreams and what it is I think will happen if... And I find myself back, week after week, spreading the questions like puzzle pieces between us. I talk about how things make me feel. I talk about what I wish I was, and don't believe I am. I talk about my desire to be prettier, or thinner, about my perceptions of the world, about friendship, about trust. I talk about boys, long, winding conversations where I can't tell beginning from end, the heartbreak from the hard conversation from the new possibility. We take our time.--Nearly three years later, we sit in leather chairs. Her office has moved to a different building on campus, and it's only a brief meeting - we're both in between so many things. But I have to tell her - not in the words, I'm engaged! - but in the smile, in how I tuck my hair behind my ear and how I smile (I smile differently now, softer, I think, but also bursting with life), tell her that she has made a difference. A big one.It was as simple as being seen those years ago on her couch. It was as simple as her kind smile amid the puzzle pieces and the grace that pours out when we see one another. And as I untangled all the knots of not needing it, I realized - I did.I needed to be seen. And she saw me - saw me wild and free and imperfect and so desperate to share myself with the world and so afraid to do anything. Three years later, and we are both near tears, and I tell her the words I should have said a long time ago:This was one of the things I remember most from college. You were one of the most important people I met here. And you, seeing me? It meant everything.Can I ask us again, wherever we find ourselves? Can we see each other again? Can we pause, and look for each other, look past the Oh, I'm fine, and the schedule and the college exams and the minivans. Because it means everything.Love,hilary

dear hilary: a revolving door

Dear Hilary,Every one around me seems to be falling in love. The older I get the more I realize I'm not sure what being in love means. Each person I ask how they know it's the love and not some other shade of love they never answer the same. And yet somehow it's the same. The person always finishes with, "You'll just know." But I don't know. How did you know it was love?Sincerely,Is It Love?Dear Is it Love?,I think I asked myself that question every night before I fell asleep in the days leading up to meeting Preston for the first time. Is it love? I asked a group of ducks that wandered across the road on my way to Starbucks one morning. Is it love? I asked my bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror. Is it love, is it love - and behind the question was this fear about myself. I had asked people, just like you have, about love. I had heard the many answers: that you know because they will order the Chinese food on the night you need it without being told, that you know because they'll offer to do the laundry and the dishes in the same day, because they catch you around your waist on the street, with people watching, and kiss you. Because they'll tell you things that you've longed to believe about yourself but you couldn't before, give you a pair of hands to help you hold all that you are and desperately hope to become.I had heard it.And then I met Preston in that airport.I'd tell you that I just knew, too, but the truth is that I think knowing about love is more like a revolving door. You walk around and around inside love, see the outside world in one instance, the inside world (the world of you and the person you love) in another. You ponder them both in the same moment. You spiral in and out of knowing, in and out of certainty.What keeps you afloat is trust.What keeps us all afloat is a trust that even if we don't know, if we have moments when we wake up and it is a question, when everyone tells us "you'll just know" and we think that there is no way that can be true - because I hardly know myself some days - that's when you trust that you can still walk forward, still walk around and around inside the love, and somehow see your next step.I could tell you the stories of falling in love with Preston, small moments when I felt it moving in my heart: the time we ate Chinese food on the floor watching Company (the Sondheim musical), or the time we made my family dinner in the kitchen and I was singing Alison Krauss songs and he was searing lamb chops in something I couldn't even probably pronounce, or the time that we sat side-by-side in the midst of something really hard, and prayed our way through it...But the truth is, though I knew in those moments I was in love with him, part of the joy is realizing it new every time - a moment of being surprised by the in-love-ness. It takes me asking, "is it love?" to answer yes. On days when all I want is to sit across from him in a Starbucks somewhere and write on our blogs and be in our own worlds, together and yet distinct, when all I wonder is whether this gift is really what I have now dared to dream it is...I guess a part of me likes asking, "is it love?" not because I want to doubt, but because there is something to saying yes. To choosing the answer to that question every day. To walking through the revolving door, the worlds never the same when I circle back around to them.I knew it a long time ago; and I learn it again every day.I want to wrap everyone up in the safe and beautiful words of, "you'll just know." But I also want to wrap around you the words that love is a many-splendored, ever-moving, choose-it-again-and-again kind of thing. Maybe the knowing must and should move with us, too.Is it love? We wonder in the world.There is a beauty to trusting the question as a way towards the answer.Love,hilary

dear hilary: what lives on

Dear Hilary,Have you ever been unkind to your body, or yourself?Love,judgmentalDear judgmental,I never thought I'd write anything about this story on this blog. To be honest, I never wanted to tell anyone. For a while in college, not all that long ago, I waged a silent, prim, polite war against my body.I stood at a cabinet looking at a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread and dared myself to walk away, to be braver and better than food, to not need the comfort that comes with being full, feeling full.I dared myself to go for days like that, to run every morning (that was the permission to eat, you know, if I had run). I dared myself, sly and quiet, to master desire.I think all this was around the time that I realized I wasn't ready to go to graduate school, and that I didn't know what to do with my life after, right around the night I wore a brown sweater dress and scrawled an inscription in a book of poetry I gave him for his birthday, scrawled something about how Edward Hirsch writes beauty into the world, and so should he, but I wrote it while we drove back from a conversation that changed us forever, with the light on in the car along the back roads, an ending kind of conversation.I think all this had begun a long time before that, too.I'm scared to write it here, to admit out loud that there are these days when there is still a voice in my head that tells me I would better thinner. I'm scared to tell you that the girl you look at, with her smile widening at the sight of you, with all the good she has been given, she still has a bit of glass edging its way out of her heart, too.I'm hopelessly tangled in my own story, which has wild love and this silent war so knit together they're both mine. They're both me.But I titled this what lives on. Because something always does.What lives on in me is the hope, that the patient repetition of the words, "I am beautiful," in the mirror, in the driveway, in the desperate too-long runs in the woods, they were healing words. I had to speak my way into believing them. I still have to do that. But I have hope.What lives on in me, almost two years later, is the time I sat in the parking lot with my mother who is wiser than all the rest, and let her love me back, back from this polite war against fullness, back from the rage at the lack of control we have over our days, back over my fight with my present. What lives on in me is the radical notion that there is something good alive in me, something I have made, or am making, of this time when I was unkind to my body, my self.Because what lives on is what we breathe into being, what we keep, what we cherish.So dear heart, because you will breathe life into something, let it be hopeful. Let it be beautiful, let it not be bittered by all that it was in its ache but let it be beautified by what it became, as your story always holds more than you imagine it does.I whisper to you that the things most beautiful are often first, and somehow, continuing, most broken. Wild love and a polite war. Talent and jealousy, wisdom and pride, a thousand peacekeeping and another thousand battling moments, all inside us.To me, what lives on is how wondrous we are, to contain such things - and how much more wondrous, that we can make beauty from it.Love,hilary

dear hilary: a gradual slope

Dear Hilary,There was a boy, a wild and free and brave boy who did the best he could to hurt me as little as possible. and he really made me braver, trusting God more, and less selfish than i thought possible. regardless of whether or not i would've chosen him as husband - i, undoubtedly, still love him. essentially, though, he had to say 'i like you, alot. but not always.' and now that we've both had about a month off work, we're back in the same office - not simply completing the same tasks in separate cubicles, but a part of the same ministry - planting and growing the Word, in a community that's washing each other's feet kind of family. we're not afforded the opportunity to 'have space.'How do i help my heart mend, not simply from being hurt, but from being hurt that his eyes are light and as sparkling as ever; he talks to me without regret or sadness, and that seems to have been the case from day one. i'm learning to let go, but what do i do about the lump in my throat that comes when i see how easily his fingers let loose?Love,I still notice itDear I still notice,It must have been winter, because there was ice on the sidewalk during our three minute meander to the theater. It must have been almost spring though, too, because I almost fell once or twice as the ice melted under our feet, a hopeful kind of melting, as if the ground itself wanted to be free of the long months of February and March. I'd known him more than a year. I'd passed notes for a few months. Once I tied one with some blue ribbon I found in an unused classroom during lunch and I impulsively wrote, "love hilary" on the outside of the note, creased it again and again in my pocket before I gave it to him.So it must have been the end of winter when he told me that "he liked me too much" to have ever wanted a relationship. He told me almost laughing, a joke we were sharing that I couldn't catch the punchline of. I remember vaguely that he wore the same jacket to school every day, a brown frayed corduroy one that made me wonder if he was cold walking to and from his car every morning across the frozen parking lot. He said so many things in that walk to theater, his laughter moving so swiftly to confusion and then something that sounded like pity. Because he liked me too much, we'd make an amazing power couple, but you see, as friends.I saw him at school every day for the next four months. We had lunch in a group together every week, his brown corduroy jacket and his old sneakers and all I could think when it was happening was how could he laugh like that, tell stories about his guitar or the rival high school debate team, how could he be so whole, while I sat and thought my life would surely end and it could never be the same and it was never and always and everything, and I was heartbroken.So I wanted to tell you and me both, me that girl not all that long ago, who longed for him to long for her, who wondered (and still wonders) about the wholeness we think we understand in other people - I wanted to tell us that hearts mend on a gradual slope. You walk through each day and notice one hundred things. You walk through the next, and perhaps you only notice 97, perhaps there are three things, the way he holds a coffee cup, the laugh he has when he heard something that makes him nervous as well as happy, the sound of his fingers against a keyboard, that somehow fade. And the next day, maybe something comes back, and something else leaves, and time is the healer not because time makes anyone less the wonder that you always knew them to be, but because we move in the slow swirl of the months and days, and we are freed by the movement. You don't know how he is healing - and I say it in the present tense because even if he ended things, he must also heal, mend, build back together his self from the threads and pieces of what's come before. How he moves along the gradual slope is hidden from you. How he heals in the midst of seeing your lovely self, and all the hundred small things he knows about you - how you hold a coffee cup and laugh in the morning and sign your name on an office birthday card - is his. Yours is yours. If you can, try not to compare how it looks like he feels to how you know yourself to feel.You mend by moving in the swirl of those months, by sharing the space you must share but not looking too long or too worried in his direction at the conference table.We are freed by the movement. We are freed by the way time so gently journeys us back and away and yes, at the pace it must be, you will find yourself looking again - and you have let go.Love,hilary

dear hilary: keep a vigil

Dear Hilary,How do you love your friends when something happens - something hard or scary or sad or all of the above? How do you say something when everything is unsayable? When you're thrown for a loop, when someone moves and the other stays, when someone is changing and it all seems to go so fast you can't get your mind to wrap around it, and it feels like everything is on the brink of being lost? How do you love them when you don't even know yourself what it is you should say, or all the words dry up like sawdust in your mouth the second you think to speak them?Love,A worried friendDear A worried friend,A friend loves at all times. That's Proverbs. I heard it first on a promotional video at a conference full of women older than me, women with children and husbands and dreams I sometimes had trouble understanding, we were in such different places. I heard it, the words lilting out over a full audience while I held a seven month old girl as she whimpered for her mother, who was the one speaking those words, her South African accent adding a dip and pull to the syllables. I stored it up, those words in her voice in that crowded hotel ballroom, stored it up for a moment like yours, when the telephone lines of friendship get tangled and we fear, desperately, that we have lost a connection.A friend loves at all times.You have to keep a vigil now. It is a deep and difficult practice, one that will test your ability to forgive and be the forgiven. You have to walk the long road in the middle of the night, the daily work of loving in the midst of change, the daily work of accepting that perhaps you do not understand but you love, and understanding is not needed before we love, it is a gift we receive in the midst of love.You have to keep a vigil, because when we are fragile creatures of bones and skin and heart muscle beating out of time with itself and when we live in a world where everything that we thought we knew we did not know, and all that we assumed we could never face until we were grown up we face today. Keep a vigil over this friend, from whatever distance or proximity, from whatever time of day or night.The same night I heard that message I remember not sleeping. It might have been the pullout couch mattress in the hotel room, or it just might have been my heart, sore and tired from asking those hungry and impatient questions. I crept out of bed, and into the tiny hotel bathroom, and stared at myself in the mirror. My face was pale, my freckles like tiny stars sprinkled over the bridge of my nose. I was so tired, and I wanted to sleep, and I stood with the cold bathroom tile against my feet and then I lay down on the floor, curled into a ball, and cried and cried and cried. I stopped only to worry that I was waking the woman sleeping peaceful in her bed next to me. I stopped to listen for the baby, and her steady breathing. But oh, how I cried that night, that hotel bathroom in Hershey, Pennsylvania keeping watch over me and the people I was holding onto and the people who, I knew, I must set free.That was a vigil.It's sometimes like that.Be unafraid to keep it messy. Be unafraid to have days when you don't want to watch, when you run and your hands brush your face and you wonder why you have been called to this. Be unafraid of how your heart is fragile and is breaking, always breaking, because in breaking it is freed again and again for that refrain, which I know you can hear echoing - a friend loves at all times. Keep a vigil over it. And look out over the night - can you see us all, our thousand tiny flames lit beside you? You are not alone.Love,hilary

dear hilary: honor is not in a tan line

Dear Hilary,Beach season is a self-conscious time for most girls, but sometimes as a Christian I find it especially stressful.  On the one hand, I have society and the media telling me that my body is hideous and that I'll never be considered attractive unless I can live up to an unreachable standard.  On the other hand, I have church culture telling me that as a girl, my body is TOO attractive, to the point where I need to be ashamed of it and keep it covered up at all costs to "protect" the men folk, and I get raised eyebrows from church friends when I say that I'm thinking about buying a bikini for the first time this summer.  As a Christian, how can I learn to be comfortable in my own skin without being improper?  And how can I shut out the noise long enough to just relax and enjoy a summer day by the ocean?Love,Modestly PerplexedDear Modestly Perplexed,I love you in the midst of this question. I love how you grapple with it, the wonder about the line that doesn't really exist in the ways we want it to - the line between feeling not attractive enough about ourselves and feeling too attractive towards other people. I want to tell you loud and bright in the midst of this, if I can put my two cents in, since you've asked?buy the bikini.don't forget sunscreen (my upper back will testify to the pain that comes with sunburn...), and take a book from the library with its crinkling plastic protector that creaks slightly as you turn the pages.I don't tell you because buying or wearing a bikini is the only stamp of approval or a self who sees her self well. I don't tell you because I think everyone should, or because I think that by putting it on you will answer the question about modesty and attraction and the whole mess of expectations and cultural norms that come with them. Modesty is about honor, not tan lines.  Modesty is about an attitude towards your body and others, not about a mystery ledger of rules that say, hemlines of this length or longer or shirts of this material but not that, or dresses that swivel with your hips slightly, but not extremely...So truthfully, I think our choices about what to wear follow from our other choices about how we want to walk through the day, how we want to approach one another, how we want to see one another. We can't buy a bikini and hope that it will make us brave or fearless on its own - we have to choose the brave and fearless when we're wearing two sweaters and a pair of jeans. And we can't hope those two sweaters and a pair of jeans will make us magically modest - we have to choose the attitude of modesty and honor when we're wearing the bikini.Maybe it's a wild hope of mine that we can gather back from the stray corners of this or that book or blog post or church conversation or pinup calendar a better sense of what it means to live inside these beautiful bones. Maybe it's wishful thinking that you and I can take the questions tumbling from you about being free and beautiful and alive, and lay them next to questions about being thoughtful and attentive and sensitive - and do that free of the chaos of voices with loud opinions and tape measures.But I'm going to hope for that. I'm going to go ahead and say you won't come up with the same answers that I will, or that your next-door neighbor will, because we live and move with different communities and so our choices, in seeking to honor others and ourselves, will be different. We needn't fear that. We need to listen to each other. If the girl in the pew next to you makes different choices about modesty and her body, listen first. Why does she choose that? And listen without feeling that her choice is a secret expectation on you to choose the same - honor is in listening and upholding one another in how we learn to live out these questions in our own skin.I can see you wanting to run along the ocean at the turn of the tide,  build a sandcastle in the middle of the afternoon for hours, turrets and a moat and a driftwood drawbridge, chase after the joy of summer and let the sun warm your shoulders.Buy the bikini. I know it's beautiful.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the winds of homecoming

Dear Hilary,I have to admit I'm scared. After a few years of living oceans away from my hometown, I am moving back to what I used to consider my home. The only problem? It doesn't feel like home anymore. I'm worried that people will expect me to be the same as I was four years ago, but the truth is I've changed. I've drawn closer to God and I love how He has shaped me over the past few years, but I am afraid those I used to be close to will only see me as "not the same" as I used to be.Hilary, how do I shake the fear of rejection and embrace this new season of my life?Love,Scared to Move OnDear Scared to Move On,When one of my dearest friends was on her way back from Italy last summer, I wrote in the journal I was keeping for her (a journal of thoughts to share with her, stories of my days, questions about her time in Italy and her joy and her journey) this quote from Rilke:

Oh, not to be separated,shut off from the starry dimensionsby so thin a wall.What is within usif not intensified skytraversed with birdsand deepwith winds of homecoming? - Rilke, Uncollected Poems

I want to give that to you here - that image of the winds of homecoming. I don't really know how to make sense of it myself, if I'm honest, and I don't know how to give it to you. Words are unwieldy gifts. But you have written so tenderly about your fear that Rilke, in his own tenderness, seems to be the necessary reply.My shortest answer to your question about whether people will see you as changed or simply "not the same" - whether they will embrace who you are becoming or mourn who you are no longer? You cannot control what people make of the changes. Some people will be overwhelmed by the new picture of you that they see. Some of them will take it completely in stride. The human heart can react in a thousand ways to the same situation and there is just no telling, not for one moment, what a given person will do or say in response to what they see. I wish I could offer you more control - but the truth is, the fear you harbor is about a thing that you cannot control no matter how or when you come home, no matter what you write about it, think about it, process out loud or silently about it.The fear is not bad, in and of itself, but it does not have a solution that has anything to do with other people. You have to mud wrestle this fear on your own. You have to slide tackle it. Rilke can help us, here. You talk about being away from home as having changed you, going from what you were to what you are now, going from one thing to another, as if you have lost the first person along the way. But I think we are expanded - I think that's what Rilke wanted to show us. We are intensified sky traversed with birds. We are deeper for having the winds of homecoming in our bones and our bodies. We are among the widening expanses.Travel, being away from the familiar, expands us. I don't think you have lost the person that your friends and family from home would have recognized. I think, rather, that she is deepened and shaped by your having been away. You have not lost her; she is simply revealing new dimensions and spaces.So you have to wrestle with this fear that you have become someone people cannot recognize, that your self has changed so profoundly that others will not love and cherish it. For I think that the people in your life who love and cherish you will love and cherish how the winds of homecoming and the winds of departure and the winds of being away have shaped you. I think you must lead the way in this: love and cherish who you have begun to become. Love and cherish and beam out to us that you have begun to transform, and that though it is filled with beginning and uncertainty and all the rest, though you are slide tackling your fears about it, you believe it is beautiful.Dear heart, believe the winds of homecoming are beautiful in you.Everything follows from that.Love,hilary