ask relentlessly

Dear Jack and June,I would begin this with an apology - it has been so long since I've written - but I think, somehow, that you understand. You were with me, both of you. I know that you must have felt in your own way the pace of the fall, before you arrived and our family widened.Together, we studied and defended a dissertation proposal. We graded papers and wrestled. We read Daniel Tiger books and we sang loud the first 8 tracks of Hamilton. I want to tell you something, because our lives are busy and sometimes I have been busy, carrying you alongside me into the busyness. We spend time - you with toys you're determined to eat and me with words and emails and philosophy abstracts and attempts to write creatively.Today I had a moment when I realized that it is hard to want so many different things in a life. To be a parent and a spouse and a philosopher and a writer, to create and to build, to take long showers (a luxury, a luxury!) and go out on dates and to play in the backyard and to have loud dance parties to the Hamilton songs you know so well.But, my loves, I want you to know, that even in the midst of asking for what many will tell you is too much, I remembered something important about this family, this family that was waiting for you all along -we ask relentlessly.We ask God for big things. We ask for wild dreams, for places to be our fullest selves, for the courage to walk outside of our fears and expectations of who we are, moving always towards what lies ahead. We keep going even when we can't quite see the road.I want you to know this from the beginning, for even when it is hard and seems impossible - whether it's balancing playing the flute and taking ballet or playing soccer and basketball or painting or calculus or French or your first job and your first love. Do not be afraid to tell God about the more that you want - the thing slightly outside the realm of what you are accustomed to thinking possible or easy or manageable. Tell God these things, shout them in the car or whisper them on walks.He is not surprised at how big of a life you want.This part of belief is not often talked about - believing in more than we think possible. And there are disappointments along the way, there are dreams to which the answer is no, or not now, or not this way... but I promise you, even those answers are good because you have gathered up your courage to go ask God. You have shown up in the throne room. You have demanded the kind of relationship that God is always looking to have with us: the one-on-one, no-holds-barred, fighting-to-believe-hard-things one.I write this because I want you to be unafraid of asking for a big life. For a life fuller than the one you think you deserve or you think you can bear. Jesus would like to bear it with you, to meet you in it, to make a bold question the reason for a deeper relationship.You have taught me that I can ask this. Your bold entrances into my life, your life-changing-ness, your joy, your willingness to ask a lot of me and the love that is being built between all of us as we grow into the family that we are.I am asking God for a big life. I am asking God for a bold life. I pray that you will someday ask this too.Love,mom

dear june: when it has been 18 weeks

Dear June,Hey girl. I have been writing this in my head for a while - these days go by so much faster than they should. Your brother - have you felt him poke you yet? - keeps us moving, sun up to sun down, and there is little time for writing. But God makes enough time for us to be just where we are before we go somewhere new. There is enough time in forty weeks of waiting for you to be in this togetherness.Let's just come right out with it: when we went in for your ultrasound, in the same octagon-shaped room where we learned a few things about Jack, it had a heaviness to it that is hard to explain. I want you to know right away that it is not wrong for our lives to be changed by what happens in them. Heaviness is not always bad - for me and your dad, the heaviness was a heaviness of remembering what a gift it is to see you before you are born. And it was a heaviness of remembering that Jesus first walked us back to that room two years ago and when we walked out we were made new. How do I explain this? We became something in that room. We became the us that we are now -or, I should say, the us that we were when we walked in to see you.It will be easy to think that your brother changed our life because of some details about his ultrasound (details about eyes and chin and cleft lip and palate). It will be easy even for us to think that those details are what made everything different. We had a different kind of pregnancy than we had expected; we had a different journey through hospital hallways, in broom closets turned conference rooms, waiting by the phone for surgeons to give us updates.But you changed us on Friday just as much as your brother changed us two years ago. You changed us with your kicks and squirms, with your chin and eyes and tiny hands waving on the screen.We are always being made new by each of you. We are always encountering the heaviness and the goodness of becoming parents to you, because you and your brother make us the mom and dad we are. By your faces and hands, by your laughs and kicks, by your willful determination and your very living.You are our first daughter, and we could not be more excited, more anxious to meet you. I used to imagine how it would feel to learn I would have a daughter. But this is far beyond what I imagined; you've brought me somewhere my imagination couldn't ever reach. I love you to the moon and beyond it; I sit in this chair, where we will sit in some handfuls of weeks together, and I realize that I am not the same as I was when we walked in to your ultrasound on Friday. You've already started making us new.We named you Junia, after the apostle that's just mentioned - the smallest glimpse in the Bible - of someone whose life was radiant with light. I pray that your life, June, is radiant too. I pray that it defies and surprises. I pray that it is heavy with the goodness of walking next to Jesus. That goodness is not always pretty or easy; becoming your mom and Jack's mom has not always been pretty or easy. But it is and always has been radiant.Here we go, June - as one of my favorite songs says, "into the dark and wonderful unknown." May Jesus illuminate our going with his radiance.All my love,mom

dear jack: the oxygen itself

Dear Jack,You got your trach almost exactly 18 months ago. Its birthday is three weeks after yours - it's always chasing you, trying to keep up, but you're always a little ahead of it. This is the way that you are with the whole world, I think. Running out a little ahead, exploring and climbing and pushing your way through clumps of grass and tree branches and holding your hands under the hose outside.Your trach follows you, and yesterday, we learned that it will follow you a bit longer.It might seem like this is confusing. You aced your sleep study, you breathe on your own all day while you run around. And so we thought, me and Dad and your doctors, that yesterday would be the day you didn't need the trach anymore. We told people about April 11, and their excitement translated to prayer and hope and smiles and imagining with us all that could change, would change when we left the trach behind.But yesterday you showed us that your busy self needs the safety of easy breath at night. You who love to babble at us all day long need an airway free of obstruction when you sleep. And the trach gives you a safe, secure airway, one that lets your lungs breathe this gift of air and give your body oxygen, breath by sacred breath.When you first got the trach, I told you that what Dad and I wanted more than anything was for you to breathe easy, to know what it was like to breathe without fighting for it. And you do this so beautifully, Jack. And that's what matters. What matters is the oxygen itself, what matters is that fierce molecule of life, what matters is that you run around and play and sing and sleep without worrying or fighting to keep oxygen.You are already so much bigger than the trach, Jack. Your life stretches tall and far like your favorite maple tree in the front yard. You love to be chased and tickled and you love to dance to the record player and you love to throw the green frog kickball in the backyard. Keeping the trach for a while longer, for however long you need it, is so small.Sometimes it might seem not so small. Sometimes people might point or stare, or ask what it is, sometimes people might think it is harder for you to do things. Sometimes the rhythm of our home might feel really different from the homes of some of your friends, and it is a little different. But what I want you to know, when it feels different, when the trach feels like it separates you or when people stare or don't know how to talk to you, when you're scared or angry -you can ask Jesus to tell you the story of you and your trach. You can march up to the throne of God and ask, in a way I can't ask for you, to hear the story of your creation, the story of how God calls you, you, Jackson David, very good. You can go out onto the water where we look for Jesus and you can wrestle and argue and fall down and be rescued and keep arguing and being rescued every day. This is the fullness of life with Jesus, Jack. It includes argument. It includes telling our stories and hearing our stories told.So for however long you have the trach, however long you need it, however long it helps you breathe easy, I pray that you keep asking Jesus to tell you the story, that you keep asking to see the goodness and fullness. I pray that you keep running and chasing and laughing when you're tickled. I pray that you keep loving the feel of water in your hands and splashing in the tub. I pray that you live in the fullness of easy breathing. As for me, I'll be thanking God for that small bit of silicone, and the wondrous life of yours it helps protect.Love,mom

dear jackson: on daring, and prayer

Dear Jackson,When you were small, in what feels like a different country, hidden behind hills of time, when you lived in the country called the NICU, I used to number the minutes. I used to count your breaths, the dip and climb of your oxygen. I used to pray each time you inhaled that the breath would come back out and that you would take another one. I prayed single words as you breathed - keep. breathing. one. more. breath. It was not that you were in imminent danger, exactly - the doctors told us daily that you were stable, that you were safe - but having once witnessed what it was for you to cry out for oxygen, I could never shake the need to count each rise and fall of your chest.Today I realized I have stopped counting.Now I watch the rise and fall of your chest with a confidence that comes, not from the little tube we slip in your neck each week, not from the nurse who watches over you in the long nights, but from you.It comes from how you run from your room to the record player, how you bring us the puffs when you want more, how you love to be chased down the hallways. It comes from how you laugh when you see us, hair sticking up wildly in all directions, when you wake up from naps. It comes from how you press against me in this phase of being afraid of strangers and then how you push away from me back into the world. You are daring, you are adventurous, because you feel safe.And so I stopped counting your breaths.I tell you this as a way of telling you something about prayer. I prayed once by counting. And now that I have stopped, that I have dared to believe you'll breathe without being watched, I find myself at a loss for how to pray. It was easy when there was panic, to keep me focused, to keep the demand right in front of God. Is this trust, I wonder as I watch you attempt to crawl up onto the couch? Is it resignation?We are in a new country, God and I, unfamiliar and brighter. I have to squint my eyes to make out the horizons of where I think I might be going. In the old country of the NICU, the only way I could talk at all was to yell and to count. Now I have stopped counting and stopped yelling - what is left? How will I begin to say something again?  So I pray to you, Lord Jesus Christ, together with the Father who is without beginning and Your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages Amen.I once memorized the feel of these syllables in my mouth, in the anxious wanderings of my freshly 18 year old heart, my knees knocking as I stood in the unfamiliar familiar, Greek and English twisting up and out, past icons and candles, the singing. Every Amen is a comma in the Eastern Church, a pause in the endlessness of worship. I would walk in, often a few minutes late from idling in the car afraid to walk in alone, worship having already begun. I would leave clutching the blessed bread from the priest's warm hands, a piece of the liturgy to go into the world with me. Every Amen a comma, a pause.Back then I thought it proved something to pray conspicuously. I would go into the small windowless study room on my floor, a few doors down from my room, holding a small white spiral bound book of Orthodox prayers - all but announcing my piety to the tangle of women walking the hallway or simply finding the time to take a shower, do their homework, sink their roots into college. I would fumble through the prayers at noon, holding a knotted bracelet to count repetitions of the Jesus prayer. I would make confession, ask forgiveness, pray in a more righteous voice as time went on. I hid my heart in the glorious prayers of other people - surely, God would be more impressed with me if I prayed in ancient words instead of my own.But I want to tell you, Jack, you whose spirit is full of daring, full of courage, full of light - prayer for me now is laughter. Prayer is silence, prayer is half-formed thoughts I say in between tickling your stomach. Prayer is singing "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" night after night and feeling your head sink onto my shoulder as you remember where we are all going - out into that Jordan River, out towards home.Do not be afraid if someday you reach for words - your own, the Church's - and you find your hands come back to you empty. Do not be afraid if you come out of one type of prayer and walk the road for a long while without knowing what to say next.Every Amen is a comma, a pause, and courage is sometimes pausing long enough to feel God's friendship in the weight of your son on your shoulder. That is prayer enough. God hears.Love,mom

dear jack: one

Dear Jack,

Today you are one. You said "mama" to me yesterday, looking straight at me, babbling it over and over and over as you pivoted in your trademark style, tried to turn over the trash can, unplug a light and topple a bookcase. This morning we went outside - the air is finally cool and light against our skin - and you stood up on your own on the sidewalk and looked at me defiantly. You'll take the step when you want to, and you want me to understand that clearly.

Before you were born, there was a lot we didn't know. We didn't know what it meant to have only one eye and ear. We didn't know what cleft surgeries were like, the stiff smell of sanitizer in the room where we waited for you to come out of surgery. We didn't know the particular beeps of oxygen saturation monitors, when they dip a little low, or too low.

But I talk about that a lot, don't I? And today, on your birthday, I want you to hear what we did know. What we have always known.

 You belong.

We always knew that. We knew that in the first search for your heartbeat at 9 weeks, the first ultrasound at 12 and the second that become the next seven. We knew that when I was sweating through the fetal MRI, and when we drove back and forth to the hospital. We knew that through timid genetic counselors and surgeons and phone calls. We named you and we knew you. You belonged from the beginning, and we belong with you.

You know what else we knew, buddy? We knew that a different body doesn't make it a broken one. We told you - did you hear us back then? - that you are the very fullness of the image of God and Jesus rises with his hands and feet and side split and opened and these are what the world calls broken but we call glorious. You have always been the fullness of that image.

We knew it then and we learn it from you every day. And we learn to keep electrical cords and breakable cups out of sight, that the trash can in the bathroom makes the best drum, that it's better to ride in the big laundry basket and that our laughter is funny enough to laugh at.

All this ordinary glory.  One year doesn't seem like enough time to contain it all. Time itself seems to have stretched to make room for all that you've given us.

One year ago, you took your first few breaths. John the respiratory therapist helped you, but you pulled your breathing tube out on your own when the nurses weren't looking. And every day since, you've lived fully and unapologetically and determinedly, and you've pulled out trach and gtube and laughed at me while doing it, you've learned to sit up and stand and crawl and almost walk even though they said you were "disenfranchised" and you never look back unless to check that we're keeping up. You pull us into the gift of your life. There won't be enough words for it, maybe ever.

When you were born, you took all my old life away with all its old thoughts and fears, all its questions, and those first few breaths, you gave me back a life that's bigger.

I've always loved you with my whole heart. One year in, Jack, I love you with the whole heart that you've made wider.

Love,mom

dear jackson: the work on the ground

Dear Jack,I have begun so many letters to you. Each one drifts away from me in the busyness of joy, this business you set me about, to be your mother, to become your mother. Day in and day out, you set me back on the ground, back at the beginning. You are learning to sit on your own, and you always turn back to me, grin widening to let me in on the secret - that all the work begins here on the ground. You turn back to your toys and you press the button one more time, the music comes back on, you clap your hands, we repeat.All the work begins here on the ground.This was the time, last year, of my first letter to you, named as you are, Jacks, Jackson, Jack. More often we call you buddy. Most often we call out to you with our laughter, and you call us with yours.Last year I told you that you might need a little help breathing and eating. That was true, but last year it was so new and we pricked our fingers trying to hold all the hard words at once, searching the damp and crinkly pages of the ultrasound for answers. It was rushed and we were trying to be unafraid for you. I want to reach back to me then, I want to reach back with you and your laughter, your smile that is wide enough for past and future, for a world good and difficult. I want to reach back through the folds and wrinkles of time to tell her that it is you, learning to sit on your own, who can make us unafraid. That it will be you teaching, not me.This time last year I wrote to you, afraid as I was that we wouldn't begin on the right foot with the right language with the right protections around you. This time last year I thought my skin and muscles and bones weren't enough to keep you safe in the world where most people have never examined a stoma in a neck, where most people don't know how a barium swallow study is performed, where to have only one eye or only one ear is to beg a question - "So someday, will he look normal?" This time last year I thought I was to stand in the gap, stretched far and wide like the thin coils of wire that hold up bridges. I would be the wire and the bridge, I would be the guard and the keeper, I would be safety, salt and light.I imagine someone might think I'm telling you too much about myself, the ways I thought, the things I feared. But transformation's not a work I want to hide from you, not anywhere, and I'm in a chrysalis too, little one, and you should know how much of me God keeps changing.I wrote you a letter May 9 last year, afraid to fail in giving you exactly whatever was right to give you. I was up high above the ground, whispering over and over, making rope and a bridge out of Jesus's words, take heart, it is I, do not be afraid. But here you are, calling me to the ground. All the work begins here on the ground, here where we take off our shoes. I wanted to build you a bridge to keep you from what I feared was a dangerous world, a dangerous life.Instead you have brought me to the ground of your life, you have set me to work unraveling the rope I wove so tightly, fear coiled inside it. You have set me here, among your favorite toys - Sophie the giraffe and the multicolored hedgehog, your zebra blanket, the orchestra turtle - and here I see how you haven't needed me to build you a bridge or carry you away, you've just wanted me here sitting with you, clapping and singing and making animal sounds, doing it all on repeat.It is impossible to write, Jack, what you've taught me, but the closest I can come is to tell you that I am here on the holy ground of your life unraveling a bridge I didn't need to build, neck deep in love with the self you're becoming. You lift up your arms to meet mine and we laugh. We reach back to a year ago, we pull that woman down to the ground with us, to pull her into the holy, into the good. You reach around for another toy to shake. You laugh again.All the work begins on the ground, buddy.Love,mom 

dear jackson: about your dad's second book

Dear Jacks,You are finally asleep. You have taken to resisting it unless someone is holding you, rocking you, standing up... you have a pretty specific list. I love how much you already seem to know about what makes you happy: our faces, your bright red fox toy, your yellow and purple rattle. You light up this world, you light up the rooms where you are. You've caught the hearts of your nurses and your doctors, and that smile - oh Jack, that smile - we will do almost anything to see that smile, to catch it for just another second.Last night your dad gave you a bath. You smiled and smiled and smiled at him. You already know a lot about your dad. He is the one who sings to you with the record player, the one who catches you up in his arms, keeps you safe, rolls you over and over, tummy to back and back again, helping you be strong. He is so good at that work, helping us be strong.I want to tell you about your dad's book - Out of the House of Bread. In the chaos of your arrival the months slipped by. I meant to write this when he finished it, as soon as we knew about you last year. I meant to write this all summer, while we were waiting to meet you. I meant to write this all fall, and time rushed past, slow and too fast all at once.Your dad wrote a book that kept me, that keeps me, tethered to a life of prayer. It is a book about bread. It is a book about talking to God. But Jacks, this is the thing. It is a book where Dad lays out gently, moment by moment, practice by practice, ways for people to connect to Jesus. It comes out next week, right before you are four months old.You must have heard him pray, all those long months while you were growing inside me? He would close his eyes and place his hand over you, and you would kick him back with your fierce assertions that you were listening, that you were there. He would pray with the Psalmist, pray with Scripture, pray with wonder. He would help me pray the examen. He would pray, day in and day out. He still prays this way.Your dad wrote a book about prayer. I bought you a copy. I know someday, when you have questions (because we all have questions) about this living conversation with God, about the work of prayer, this is the book I will want to have ready to give you.The kitchen is a place of great prayer in this house, Jacks. When you have questions about the work of prayer, I will tell you to go into the kitchen. I will tell you that there, sitting with your dad, I learned to pray.Chances are good Dad will be in there, his hands full of spices or dough, his eyes alight. Chances are good that the kitchen will be a place where you go to talk with God. Chances are good that God will meet you, again and again, along the hallways and among the smells and tastes in this home.When you ask me what to do, what to pray, I will offer you this book. I will offer you this kitchen, so well loved by your dad. I will tell you that this is where God meets us.Your dad will teach us so much about prayer. Much of it will be lived, something we can't write down. Some of it he wrote down, in this book, and we can read it again and again and practice it together, the three of us and everyone God sends to join us on the way.I wanted to tell you this, Jacks - your dad is a man of prayer. I can't wait for you to ask me those questions. I can't wait to give you this book.Love,mom

dear jackson: you show me Jesus

Dear Jackson,You're in six month pajamas tonight, and I can see that the feet are far too big for you, the little husky puppy faces on the ends dangling helplessly where your toes can't quite reach. You're growing so much, buddy, that I can't really believe that we were in the NICU all those weeks ago. I just wrote down "months" and erased it, because this is the truth - time has changed for us. Hours are days and months are minutes. I think this is what they try to tell you when you become a parent - time reshapes itself in the midst of you.You'll know this yourself someday, I imagine. For now, you've been out in this wild world with us for 10 weeks, and you're sleeping, hands up by your face the way you always seemed to sleep those long months on the inside. I looked at those ultrasounds again (do you remember any of that? The echoes of strange voices talking to me and Dad about you? Did you ever shake your head, at how little we all knew of the mighty person you already were?) yesterday.There is no picture of you I do not find remarkably beautiful.--In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. All the world, to be registered. This is one of the beginnings of the story of Jesus.There are many, though. There is the beginning with Mary and Gabriel, the Holy Shadow, the be it unto me. There is the beginning with prophets who cried out in wilderness and desert to make straight a highway for God. There is the beginning song of creation, the Word by which everything was made. This is the season where we begin the story, where we prepare, where we make ourselves ready--I want to tell you something about Jesus, Jack. But who am I to tell you anything about Him? You know Him. You know Him in a way I have forgotten, with your one eye scanning the world, always looking for Him, always eager, always anxious for another sighting, another glimpse.And then there you are, in the midst of the world where you are looking for the answer to your being here and the world being its beautiful self, and everyone who looks at you sees Jesus. You show Him to us.Oh, how you show Him to me. Every minute.Someone might think it's because you show me something about weakness or vulnerability. Someone else might think it's because you needed a trach and a feeding tube and it was so hard and I had to believe that God had good plans in spite of or even in the midst of.But you, Jack, you show me Jesus risen in glory and power. Jesus whose love is wild and unyielding. Jesus who walks the hallway of the NICU. Jesus who reigns in operating rooms and who comes in the might of other children who kneel the afternoon of your surgery to pray.You show me that Jesus is King and always has been.--What can I say to you about Jesus? In those days, a decree went out. An annunciation was made, and a visitation. There was a leaping for joy by John, after whom you're named (your names mean God has been gracious. But you already know this).When you open your eye in the mornings and smile at me, creasing your NAM tape, when you kick your feet up in the crib and toss your body back and forth as you reach for the toy fox, for your reflection in the mirror above your head on the play mat - you show me Jesus.In those days, God announced that He was sending you to us. In those days, God announced that you had been formed differently, that what nature often does it hadn't done the same way in you. In those days we walked, you and me, down many of the streets of downtown Waco, and in those days we caught glimpses of you - black and white, three-dimensional, printed on computer paper and clutched on the long ride home - and in those glimpses we knew. I know you, I would whisper over and over when I passed the fridge where your pictures hung. I know you, I would shout in my heart when the technicians swirled the ultrasound wand around my belly, looking for what makes you different, looking for a diagnosis. I know you. You show me Jesus, Jacks. Risen in glory and power, coming to us palms open, scars lit by the same glory, wound open so that we too can put a hand inside and touch the wonder of His work and rescue. You show me Jesus who comes in those days when the decree goes out.You show me Jesus, who holds you in those glorious scars and pours His love through them over you, and through you over others.In those days a decree went out. This is the season where we remember, where we tell the story, where we prepare for Him who is coming to live with us. And you, Jacks, you are leading me.Love,mom

a life of septembers (a letter to my husband)

Dear P,It's been a long time since I tried to write you something. Today we finished J's nursery, and I was standing in the doorway while you positioned the icons above his bed, staring at the ordinary miracle of it - how we built this space, this child, this ark of marriage. How much has changed in the long bend of years. 3 Septembers ago, beloved, we were arguing on Skype about long distance.And 2 Septembers ago I sat in your parent's dining room, a bit overwhelmed and overjoyed, my first birthday gift to you tucked upstairs. I had put trash bags over it for the plane ride, but I am so terrible at wrapping gifts, I didn't even think to tie a ribbon on them. They're hanging behind me now.And last year we fought and loved and laughed through the first few weeks of grad school, my anxiety unraveling between us, all those things I'd planned to keep safely tucked away from you discovered so soon. Isn't that just the way marriage is?I believe we will measure our lives in Septembers.This year, this September, our first child will be born. We named him and loved him together far before he was the wildly kicking baby he is now. I wanted to write you something, for this September, this moment in our ever-turning world.How you astonish me, P. You're out on the back porch grilling for the family who's coming for dinner. I see you march in and out of the kitchen with that joy of purpose. And you always, always, always have time for a kiss as you pass me on the couch. You always have time to answer some other question from this little corner where I sit, where Jacks kicks me. You astonish me, you know? I've never lacked words except for the words for you.This September we meet Jackson. And we're out here in the water with Jesus, P, hoping wild and trusting big. I wish I could tell you what it's like to drive back from Austin with you in the late afternoon, singing that one praise song, my voice catching again and again and again because I realize that I believe these words - and I look over and there you are, crying too, smiling. Your faith is an anchor in my soul. Your hope in Jesus, as you move through the kitchen, through the rhythm of our Septembers, is a reminder to put my hope in Jesus.I'm more in love with you now than I was any of our last Septembers. I'm in love with your kindness, how you get me water when I don't want to leave the couch, how you champion others, how you remember things so many other people would forget. How you love. You remind me of St. Francis. I think you both understand that if we dared to hope it, if we dared to ask, God would show us that God is far more deeply in the midst of our lives than we imagine. I think you both know how we need only ask and the grace of Christ will move in us, will open us to receive Christ Himself. I think you both pray to the God who loves birds and peonies and a green plum in season. How this creation it is good, very good, and we should pray like we actually mean to see and speak out that goodness. I sometimes praise God for the peonies, for the greenness of the backyard, for the Brazos river where we go sometimes to just be together, hands linked like they have been since that first walk that June. That's you, teaching me.This September, I am in more in love with you than I could have been, because the gift of being married to you is that I have grown, my heart is bigger, my heart has more room for loving. Thank you, for the gift of you, for the daily, gracious rhythm of life together. For how you teach me to sing praise to God. For how you praise next to me when my voice is faltering.Let's measure the turn of the years together, September by September, grace by grace. I believe there will be so many more wonders for us to see. I believe you will teach me to see so many that I would miss on my own.Love,h

dear jackson: it will be better

Dear Jackson,You are growing so much, little man. I am amazed at your hard work - the doctors say you're right on time, even measuring a few days ahead. You move and squirm around a lot, but I know that the space is starting to feel small. The world here is bigger, and there will be much more space for you on the other side. We have a big backyard and sidewalks, we have the river walk where Dad and I go sometimes to talk and sift through our thoughts, where we go to wonder out loud.It's been a little while since I wrote to you about your cleft. We had the MRI, the ultrasounds, the follow-up appointments and there will be a few more before September. You are being such a good sport about letting these strange people take pictures of you. And I know it is a lot, and I think we're both relieved when we pull out of the hospital each time, heading home, the three of us still making our way through.I have been talking about you to God, every day. Lately I've been asking how this is happening to you, this complicated, challenging stuff.  I keep saying that it seems like you're too little to have to go through all of this, that it's so unfair, how much I wish I could be the one to have this instead of you. How much I would give for you not to need any extra help, how much I would give.  And I tell God that I don't understand how this can be happening to someone I love so much, because, little man, I love you so much more than I can explain.But then Jesus asked me while I was standing in my closet, trying to pick out something to wear, in that silence that so often carries the voice of God to our noisy hearts: Hilary, do you believe that I love Jackson? And then Jesus asked me, Hilary, do you believe that what I will do for Jackson is better than what you can imagine? Little man, I do believe this. And I want you to know that I believe it. I believe that when you are born, in those few short weeks that stand between us and the mystery and adventure of your birth, Jesus will be celebrating. Jesus will be rejoicing with us that you are here, that you are finally here in the world with us. And I believe that if you are miraculously healed before birth or if you go through some surgeries, if you come out screeching or if you need a little help breathing from the doctors and nurses in the NICU, if you have some or all or none of what we are preparing for right now, I believe that Jesus will do, and is doing, better things than I can imagine.I could try to trust in ultrasounds, in MRI reports. I could try to trust in miraculous healings or dreams or prophecies or the late night prayers we are praying over you. I could try to predict what will happen, to imagine you, to imagine what is ahead. But I believe, little man, that it is better to put my trust in Jesus.And Jesus has better plans for you than the ones I could come up with. Jesus has better things for you than I can ask or imagine. Jesus knows you and loves you so much beyond my imagining.Jesus led me to your dad - and he is so much better than I could ever have imagined.Jesus led me to studying philosophy, to asking big questions about disabilities and differences, about human nature and the image of God - better than anything I imagined when I was applying.Jesus led me to the right college, to the right high school - both better than I could have imagined when I first set out.And Jesus brought you to us, and you are already so much better than I could have imagined. Carrying you along with me, every day, I remember: what God has in store is always far more than we could have imagined by ourselves.So, Jackson, these last few weeks, I am leaning on this for both of us. I don't know what is up ahead. I don't know where we will be in 8 weeks or what it will be like. But I know, I know, I know that Jesus is with us and ahead of us. He will be rejoicing when you're born, for there are far better things in store than the things we can imagine.I can't wait to see you, little man. Just a few more weeks. We will be rejoicing.Love,mom

this is what I'm waiting for.

Dear Jackson,Your godmother asks what I'm looking forward to about you. She asked as she was holding your soon-to-be friend, her sweet daughter. I was staring, lost for words, worrying, making those lists in my head with big words like NICU and surgery and MRI and cranio-facial team - all those words that if I am honest, just mean the people and the tools that are in place to help you and me and Dad as we begin our life together. They're just words for the friends and things that Jesus is bringing with Him in this wonderful season of your arrival.But I was running short on words, a little scared, and right then, you kicked me. You have such a personality, little man. Mom, I'm here. I'm okay. Every day when I start to worry, and I stop and put my hand over you, you kick back. Mom, I'm here. I'm okay. We have read a lot of the stories of Jesus' healing power these last few months. You know about Jairus's daughter and about the son who Jesus raised from the dead. You know about the woman who reached out in the crowd, just to touch the hem of his robe, and she was healed. And all those crowds, after Jesus walked on water, who just touched him, and were healed.But one of my very favorite stories to tell you is the one about Zacchaeus. Remember him? He was so curious about Jesus - like most of us are - that he climbed up a tree to get a better look. The Bible says Zacchaeus was a tax collector and very rich. This tells us that Zacchaeus was probably not a very just man, who was unfair to others in the city, who did not treat them well. He doesn't really seem like someone that Jesus would hang out with.But Jesus sees him and comes to the tree where he is sitting. And guess what, Jack? Jesus says, "Zacchaeus, hurry and climb down, for I must stay at your house today." What do you think about that? He sees Zacchaeus, hiding up in the tree and he tells him to hurry, climb down, because I'm coming to your house. Jesus isn't just able to see where Zacchaeus is hiding, but Jesus wants to be with him. Jesus is going to stay at his house.Zacchaeus is so overwhelmed and excited that he scampers down the tree and is happy to welcome Jesus. And he says to Jesus that he will make right the things he had done wrong - he will pay back people he had treated unfairly. He will give half of everything he owns to the poor. And Jesus tells everyone there, "Today, salvation has come to this house... For the Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost."There is so much I want to tell you about this story. But right now what matters, Jack, is that sometimes I have been a little like Zacchaeus hiding in the tree. I have been scared to come down from my worrying to welcome you because I have been so scared that I won't be able to be the mom that you need me to be. I have been scared that maybe I won't be good at this or ready, that I will do things wrong.But then I see Jesus standing at the foot of that tree holding you, and Jesus tells me to hurry, climb down, because you two are coming to stay at my house. You are coming to be with me. And when I hear that, and I see you and Jesus standing there, I climb down and realize that I am so happy. I am so excited for you, just like Zacchaeus was so excited about Jesus.Jack, my little man so fully alive:I can't wait to hold you. To sit with you and reading you the books our friends have been sending you - Ping and James Herriott's Treasury and The Going to Bed Book and The Mitten. To sing and dance around the kitchen for so many years that even when you're 22 and you come home after college and you think I'm ridiculous, you'll still join in.To put you in the wrap or the carrier or the stroller or the whatever-baby-gadget-we-get and showing you the world. I'll show you the leaves and their greenness, the water and the ducks that swim along the Brazos in spring. I'll show you the big sky on our drive down 7. I'll show you the cows, the wild orange and blue and purple flowers in April. I'll show you the lilacs in Boston outside Grammy and Granddad's house.To introduce you to your aunt and uncles and cousins - they'll show you the paddling pool and how to toss a football back and forth and probably how to get into mischief, too. I hope they teach you that.To hold you. I already said that. But I'm so excited for that. Just to hold you.Hurry, climb down, for I am coming to stay with you today. Jesus is bringing you with Him, Jack. He is bringing you to me and Dad. I can't believe that we get to hold you, laugh with you, rock you to sleep, teach you about leaves and ducks and cows and the good things Jesus made.I'm not hiding in the tree anymore. You and Jesus, you are waiting for me. You make me too happy, too overjoyed, too excited, not to scamper down.Love,mom

to the girls in my zumba class

Dear girls in my Zumba class,Dear you who is willing to jump up and down to music we don't really know the words to, you who is willing to do the moves with more energy after 50 minutes than I think I have in my whole body, who laughs at our blurred reflections in the mirror,you are what makes me brave. I've been up and down the mountains and hills for a little while now, with this question about food and how to eat and the fact that sometimes I don't know how to finish a bagel in the morning, I'm so nervous that it will upend my life. I've been in the thicket of the thoughts about mirrors and beauty and whether the scars on my stomach from the time I had my gallbladder removed are moments of skin knit together, moments of pride that my body is always doing a healing work on itself, or if I should be embarrassed and try to hide the thin pink line that dances near my belly button.I've thought about writing and not writing, I've written and deleted, and in the end of every day I don't write a blog post about this journey up and down the mountains of that question - am I beautiful? -you are the people I see at the other end.You jumping up and down in the aerobic studio to Pitbull and Lil' Jon. You in old T-shirts and yoga pants and running shorts and neon sneakers and bare feet. You, afraid and unafraid, because we are all a little of both if we are honest. I can't describe how much courage you breathe into my lungs just being in that second row with you.And yes, you know, it is courage to shake my hips and courage to swing them in something that I think might someday look like a circle. And yes, it is courage to keep dancing at minute 50.But it is also courage to be.You give me courage to be, without walls, without the tap tap tap of the prison guard of my mind that says I should eat less run more be more do more perfect more. In Zumba, there is no better and no best, there is just us and the courageous being of us.If I could tell you anything it is that yesterday at the end of class I walked out and realized that I think you are all, each, singly, remarkably, beautiful. I realized that I know this in my bones, that you are beautiful, that you are courageous.And maybe it's time I walked out of a class and thought of me alongside you, as one of those beautiful and bright courageous beings. Maybe it's time I walked out of class and let the lessons you are teaching me sink into my bones.I wish I could paint this for you, write the way you have built my courage from my pink sneakers to my heart, how you have changed me beyond what I had imagined could change. You, with every routine and every sigh and laugh you are rebuilding my idea of what it could mean for me to be beautiful. To be courageous. To be whole.Gratitude is not measured in a word count, so I will only say, again, you have done infinitely more than you know. And this girl, she is learning beautiful from you.Love, hilary

dear heart, love hilary

Dear little one,I already lost count of the ways I love you. Mom sent me pictures of how you grew inside her, for months and months, we waited for those brief glimpses of the two of you together, and I would yell every time and stop what I'm doing and stare at the two of you (because that's the funny thing about pregnancy - a picture of Mom is also a picture of you for nine months). Your mom is a gently beautiful person, full of joy, full of life, and now that you are here, I know that flows into you too, with the physical life she offers. She gave you a special kind of life from her heart and her body these long nine months, and now, you are here. We are beyond excited - we are out in the field of wild joy. We are out dancing in our kitchen and we are outside under the bright summer sun, laughing and praying and trying to find the right days and times to fly out to meet you.When your parents got married I fell down the stairs at the reception. Not all the way, not dangerously, just in enough of a way to be completely embarrassed and wish that I was safe from the memory. But we are a long remembering family, and so your uncles on our side and your parents and grandparents won't let me forget it - and trust me, your soon-to-be Uncle Preston won't let me forget either (he'll love telling you all kinds of stories about me). But their wedding day was a day about your parents, about two becoming one, about love. And these are the roots of love you grow from. I can promise you, little one, they are deep roots. You will grow in a richer love than you know.That day, the reading was from 1 John 4 - about how we love because He first loved us. How we know love at all because it has been shown to us by another, by He who is love. You will be fed on love that is rooted in His love. You will be loved, in the midnights and the hurried mornings, in the laughter and the snow, in the every moment, by parents whose love is anchored and rooted to God's love.And I remember that day knowing your mom - my sister - and your dad, my brother-in-law, became a family. And now you are here, and you are a part of our family, and we are jumping up and down with joy over it and I might fall down a hallway or an airport or an escalator as I run towards you when I meet you.But we anchor each other in a deeper love.We will - this whole family of yours, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents - promise in our own ways and times, to love you wild and deep and forever. There is so much I don't know about you, dear one, so much I cannot wait to discover. But I promise you a deep and wild and forever love in this family.I promise you all of my love, too. I promise you all of it, anchored in His.Love,Aunt Hilary

you free my heart, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,We're sitting in a Starbucks together, alternating putting our hands to our faces in excitement or frustration, as we try to shape our words just so, keep them honest and true, write theses and personal statements, work out this life in the way we have for so long - in the syllables sounded out silently by the reader, heard again and always for the first time.Your last letter to me. Can I say any more - but we both know it was something wondrous and I'll leave it at that.But your being is a better letter to me, always was and is - the way you look at people when you think I can't see you, when you smile at them gently, when you rage in the car about all the things but you soften, always, and you remember out loud for us both that there is good and we are to seek it.You're a seeing, and a seeking, man.You teach me. When you write to me, and I smile at you and we lock eyes over the screens and the white noise of this Starbucks, you ask me what it is, and I shake my head, and I tilt it just so and take a sip of my coffee and you return to your words, and me to this letter, and I know that you know I am still smiling over you - it's that you're teaching me something about the best story that we've been told that makes me want to tell it better. The way you tell our love story is the way we should all be telling His - fearless and free.You're a seeking, and a seeing, man.When I was in France the last time, just before senior year of high school, we had this one day at the musée Rodin, my favorite museum in Paris. We had a picnic, I think (there is a picture of us all in the grass, me in this grey and white striped shirt with sunglasses perched awkwardly on my head) before we spent time in front of the Bourgeois de Calais and were sent into the museum to draw. There is this sculpture there, The Kiss, and I remember walking by it, over and over, too afraid to stop in front of it for too long, because there was love deep and wild and true, there was love alive in the stone, as if Rodin had freed something, his creating work a work of revelation more than conjuring. Sharna drew it - she was always good at art - but I was too afraid to put my pencil to the paper. I drew instead a sculpture in the same room, called the Hand of God, and my shading was, as it always is, not true to life, and my pencil wobbled and so it's mangled on the page. I wasn't brave enough to draw The Kiss, to be near that kind of love (because it's there, alive, a gesture I think, towards the wildest love of all) but I longed to be Sharna that day, sitting at the feet of that moment writing it over and over as my pencil traced along a moleskin journal page.I've thought about that afternoon a lot in the space here, where we are together. I think if I were to find myself there, I would be brave enough to draw it. I would sit down at the feet of that sculpture, look at how the two lovers grow up from the stone itself. I would let my pencil hit the page and tilt, scratch the shadows and lines in the way I learned but never mastered, because though I will never draw like Sharna did, you free my heart to be in the midst of love like that. You free my heart to see it and to seek it.You're a seeking and a seeing man, and you're freeing me to see, and to seek, those things which years ago in a museum in Paris I learned I wanted, and was afraid to know."Mais cette transposition de ma restitus ne fait rien à mon amour car je t’aime à minuit comme à midi ; les heures, les jours, les mois, les années glissent sur lui sans le ralentir ni l’amoindrir. Au contraire, chaque minute qui s’écoule est un siècle d’amour de plus pour l’éternité, c’est ainsi que mon cœur thésaurise depuis le premier moment où il t’a aimé." - Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo, 1 décembre 1860.Love, always,hilary

one year ago (to my sister)

Dear sister,A year ago, right now, we were standing in the hot summer Colorado sun, standing and posing and laughing and trying to jump in the air while not landing badly on three inch silver heels (and yes, I managed to still trip in them, but at least it wasn't while walking down the aisle). We were in the midst of this good day that God had made, our hair neatly curled and our makeup spotless, and when you walked outside in that dress I knew no one had ever looked that beautiful before.You have always been the one to go first, the one with braces first and a car first, the one who got to be in a marching band and the one who went to school dances and proms. I remember sneaking into your room when you weren't around during your senior year of high school and trying on the dress from your junior prom. Do you remember it - you'd gotten it from Filene's, I think, and I had seen you come out of the dressing room and I had thought, no one was as beautiful. I never had a prom; but I remember sitting in the cramped auditorium seats that year to watch you walk across the stage - the Grand March, they called it - my face eager for just a glimpse of you.And I remember the time that Mom and Dad traveled away, and the boys went with them - to England, I think - and it was just you and me at home. You picked me up from school and we ate dinner together at the kitchen table and then went to Starbucks (something we wish we could do more than we do now), and I told you about the boy I liked, and you smiled at me and told me to wait and see, that God would bring the best thing at the right time. You told me that boys are complicated. You told me that hearts hurt but that they also heal. I still think about that now.And then I remember, smiling and laughing as I write this, that phone call when he proposed, and it was midnight our time but I waited up for you. We crowded in the hallway just by the linen closet between my room and our parents', and we could all hear how your joy spilled over the phone line and time change, how surprised you were, how good it was. I carry that memory with me, too, and I can remember the feel of the floorboards creaking as I paced back and forth, listening to the story, overwhelmed and overjoyed.And then last year, when I walked down the aisle before you, when I turned, finally at my place, and saw you and Dad walking together, I thought then, too, that no one was as beautiful as you were. And then you married the man whose heart is wide and honest and faithful. You married the man who makes you laugh and smile quiet, the man who builds a home with you and prays with you and loves you.One year ago, we were in the middle of your wedding day, silver shoes and a blue dress, and I carry those memories with me as I sit in a Starbucks in Texas, while the afternoon rolls on and the sky outside is the same blue as that Colorado sky.You teach me the way of love is a long journey, a daily obeying, a moment by moment cherishing. You teach me that there is more to it than high school boys and the Friday nights without someone to take us to the movies. You teach me that it is built in the ordinary, in the every day, in all the small things that turn beautiful in their time.You were the most beautiful bride I have ever seen, one year ago -but you are more beautiful now,and every year forward, because you keep teaching us to love. Because you keep loving.Love,your sister

the ache is still beautiful, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I will never, ever, ever, EVER do long-distance.Was that what I said? Did I say that to you once, in a conversation, in passing, probably tilting my head the way I do when I'm not sure what I'm saying is true, but I want to convince you that I'm being really thoughtful? I imagine you were painting in your garage at the time, and I could hear the paint hit the canvas with some kind of fierceness that I didn't understand. You paint forcefully, and sometimes I think maybe that's the way of making beauty; a little forceful, the way that brightness asks for strength to bear it. Sometimes, when we're on Skype and you can't see me, I close my eyes, and listen to you painting, and the silence says more than my words will.But me and that long distance. My vehemence when I said those words seems to grow in my memory, a defiance to it I'm not sure was there, but makes a story somehow wilder, so I tell it that way. I was stamping my feet against the old hardwood of my bedroom floor, or something like that, insisting that the way of love must be just something daily, something clear and easy and full of Friday nights barefoot on a beach or along a boardwalk somewhere and that attempting to build across miles and continents and time changes was the worst idea, ever.Never mind the stories I have been told my whole life. Never mind the long walk through the woods behind campus that sunlit afternoon when my dear friend told me that our choices weren't ever about distance, but about steadfastness in the face of it. That distance could be agonizingly hard but that the space created between those two distinct places, and those two distinct people, would be nearer and closer, a mystery closed to those who watch it. And of course that afternoon, when my mother opened the pages of her own writing to me, the binding frayed and worn by love and how she, like me, said she'd never do long distance.But I knew the ache already, I said. I knew the work. I knew the uncertainty. I would never give it a try.I knew so little, P. I knew so little of the ache.Because this? This ache is beautiful.This is the ache of remembering how we sit side by side at that kitchen table and make worlds with our words, offering each other living water for the journey. This is the ache of how I can hear how you laugh with me, almost falling off your chair, how I can feel your hand brush the small of my back as we go up for Eucharist, how I remember the way you look at me sometimes, this look of wonder that just takes my breath away.This is the ache of how our hearts whisper loud across time zones but gentle when we're in the same room. This is the ache of wanting to tell you when I burst in the door out of breath from running with God that I realized, just then, the radical grace that is when God and I are quiet, together, how I can feel Him running with me but how sometimes, when I complain to Him (like I did the other day) that He feels far away His words are sharp and quick about the reason He runs with me (love, and sanctification, and my feeble heart). I'm longing to tell you, not in messages or typed words, but in the look on my face and the unspoken question I know you'll ask me, and how I will answer just by nodding and smiling. And we will have said a thousand things without saying them.I knew nothing about the wild love of long distance. I knew nothing about how the bridges it builds withstand the longest days and heaviest hearts, how the spaces of Skype and these two blogs and how you write my name on an envelope, they are spaces that are gifts, too. And I am the first to say, to you, to whoever might read this, that the distance aches and hurts and the dip and sway of it sometimes knocks me over.But I'd not be me if I didn't admit to you, that more truly, I knew so little of this, how beautiful it is. How wondrous they seem now, the people I thought foolish for trying something I called impossible. How beautiful, how brave. How I now want to call each of them up and say, "I need you to know I see your courage and your strength, how you wove the threads that kept you, cocooned in love." How I want to tell them that the ache is agonizing and how I miss you,but how their ache, and ours, is still beautiful.Love, always,hilary

the world rights itself, a letter to preston

Dear Preston, I started this letter as a blog post a couple of weeks ago, thinking I'd be able to somehow manage to make it work, say what I want it to say. But you got on a plane yesterday and my words keep tangling themselves up in the ache of leaving. So I'm just going to let my mind wander next to yours for a while, okay?"I feel weird, God." I crack open the prayer, feet finding their stride. Three minutes later there is a line of sweat down my spine, the sun has climbed high in the afternoon and I am nowhere closer to knowing what to say. "I feel out of place, standing here, wanting to be in the story that is not mine, wanting to be a part of things, always, a part of the center of things. What's wrong, Lord? Why can't I pray?"I kick at the ground and achieve a magnificent spray of gravel.When I was in England a few years ago, I remember suddenly, I walked across long empty fields in the afternoons. I have never quite understood what it was I kept looking for in the silences - perhaps it was simply the feeling of not being alone with my small muddied boots and big troubled heart. Or perhaps it was a feeling of trust again, that the world, so terrible and so beautiful, was not against us. I walked and walked, preaching myself a sermon for Palm Sunday about how deeply human the story is - how we can each, in every moment, shift our posture to Pilate, to Peter, to Mary. (I know I told you this story, on Skype, but bear with me) I don't know how to bear the distance other than to keep praying that somehow the field years ago in England is not so far away from the field where you were sophomore year of college in a late afternoon when you weren't sure what you were becoming or how. I don't know how to understand the separation other than to think of me running last week with the world tilting on its axis, Madeleine L'Engle and missing you and a wish for more beautiful words all happening at once, and to think of you, wherever you are when you read this, if it's in your kitchen or while you wait for coffee or somewhere else... to think that such moments are us in one big field and perhaps that is the secret to love reaching always across the miles -time and a meadow,a field somewhere and when before we knew each other,somehow, through the telling and retelling of our stories,in the chaos of arranging tables on Saturday and the quiet of driving home, holding hands the way we do now,when I was preaching a sermon to myself in England and you were in a field in Texas,and when a little boy of seven gives me free pink lemonade on my way home in the afternoon, the world rights itself.For a moment, a thin place on the backroads in the haze of summer: and again, the still, small voice, the one that whispers, calm your heart, that day He says, all shall be well. That's as much as my words can hold, I think. All shall be well. And perhaps time and distance are not such fearsome things as I once thought.Love, always,hilary

i offer us a memory, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girland all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,Do you remember our first Skype conversation two years ago? You had said it would be good to meet, I ran 7 miles I was so nervous, down the winding road we walked down a little ways your first afternoon here, two years later. You had said it was probably about time we met, given all that we had already shared, all the words that had tumbled out between us, that very long analogy I'd given you about my friends as doctors in a hospital (I still don't think we know what I am, actually, maybe that's something to ponder), the lists of books...Before I got on Skype to talk to you, I listened to "Tonight, Tonight" by Hot Chelle Rae. Yes. It's true. It had been a song of the summer up in the office where I worked, the way we cheered ourselves up for a long afternoon of answering questions about Orientation, the size of the mattresses from frantic moms in Target holding two different sets of sheets. I listened to it in my car loud on the way home sometimes, and something about it made me feel, for a second, foolish and completely unselfconscious. So I played it three times after that long run and then you called.We already know this story, but I think memory has a funny and beautiful way of moving between people, passed back and forth, and it is never quite the same memory. Maybe that means it always hid more than we thought it did. Each telling changes what it was; it isn't the same story. I don't know if you listened to music or if you ordered a special kind of coffee to impress me (I was drinking iced tea out of a plastic cup, so, nothing too fancy for me). And the details that we labor over as writers, the things we aim to pin down with our words - things like, the night here was a deeper blue than it normally is, the kind that inks the spaces between the stars, tracing their outlines in the sky maybe those are the things that escape us on purpose.Maybe as writers, we have to be bested by our stories, work as hard as we can to capture them on paper only to realize that they are already away, laughing a little as they tear up and off, into the field, into the future, into the retellings that we don't know how to enter just yet.I think when I am asked in a kitchen somewhere, with faces and eyes that are widened in surprise that I ever lived a different life than the one I'll be wrapped up in, when they (the crowd of them, whoever they are, whatever they are named) ask me, I will tell a new story. Every time. And it will be new to me in the telling and the retelling.Writing is good for us, Preston, probably more because of what it teaches us we know nothing about and cannot say and we have spun this tale around and around and around again, how it is good because it brings us nearer a better silence. But I think about it with memory - that memory of listening to "Tonight, Tonight" in my bedroom before that first Skype call, now as we round our way towards what must be dozens (dare I say it, hundreds? it feels like that), even now -the memory is a new story.I think about the Law God gave, how much was about the work of remembrance. Establish this as a memorial, He declares, knowing that in an old memory is new life.All of this because the song played on the radio, and I remembered two years and a handful of days ago. All this, because I think we must be a people who practice the work of remembrance, who make things new by their retelling, who are bested by the stories more alive than we think them.Love, always,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

the greater work, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girland all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here. 

Dear Preston,

She asked me while the rest of the congregation was singing the third verse of the hymn, which I can't remember in this moment, why I was so nice. She smiled up at me as she said it, flung her arms around my neck and hugged me as if she might never see me again. Her hair was in two braids, which she proudly swung from side to side to show me - "do you like my braids? Mommy did them!" And I held her close, feeling the small weight that is somehow cosmic, that in this small person there are more wonders than in all the world, because she is fearfully made, because she is. That wonder of being - that you talk about in your letter, that simple and terrifying complicated wonder of being. She is, and as I hold her, and she says, in her outdoor voice, "I love you so much!" I close my eyes.

But before I really pray, before I really get to the moment of something deep and beautiful whispered over her, before any of that, she crawls off my lap and runs back to her pew, flings her arms around her brother and waves to me, before they both take each other's hands and go to Sunday School.

I think that's the way of the world, Preston, the way that I have trouble with - that what we cherish we must somehow release.

I got to hold her for a few minutes, but as she wriggled free and tumbled off my lap and ran back to her family, her lavender dress billowing from the fan and the wind that always moves through the sanctuary, I remembered that the act of holding is, must be, an act of release.

I want to hold onto her forever. I want to hold onto people and places, hold the whole wide world in my hands (I played that for you on the backroads, your hand in mine). I used to think that was the great work: to hold fast, to hold people secure in your heart and your arms and your thoughts about them. I used to think it was the great work to stay close with your arms encircled and your eyes closed, praying over the little girl while she nestled against you.

But the truth is the greater work is to hold one another, hold this world that we want, as you say, through the threaded grace of wanting it because of God, who is the first mover and the first lover of the world - hold all that, and then release it.

And I think about the Cross, how those arms outstretched are at the same moment holding us close to the heart of a God who is too terrifying to be understood, and releasing us into the water that flows from the right side of the temple, releasing us into the life that He came to give fully, releasing us from the embrace of the world into the embrace of God. Offering and release. They're connected, I think.

If we close our selves, even around the things we love most, arms encircled around the little girl and her braids or around the best friend or around even the moments of walking through fields of shocking red and purple in Southern France -

if we hold them too closely, we cannot make the gesture of offering. Our bodies which mirror our hearts cannot do the greater work: the work of loving so fiercely and so wildly that we do, in fact, release our hold on that which we love - 

if we hold them too closely, we lose the moment to see them as gift, to offer back praise to the Giver - 

if we hold them too closely, we miss the greater work of love. 

Love, always, 
hilary