when we are not competing

I go to the gym and almost start to cry. There is a row of treadmills and a row of elliptical machines, pristine from the spray-and-wipe-down routine religiously followed by most of the gym-goers. I don't know where to start, and so I choose an elliptical machine, a familiar one, and I plug in my headphones.But I can't shake this worry that starts after about minute 3 that the soccer girls next to me are much better at this. I can't shake the worry that the woman to my left is decidedly unimpressed with the level I put my resistance at and that she is better because hers is over 30 and mine is just 22. I keep my eyes fixed on the orange blinking lights, minute by minute, and amid the shouts of encouragement from the first string center forward to the striker who are running faster than I will probably ever run in my life, I start to calculate it - more loved based on calories burned or miles run, better person, more virtuous version of herself, actually excellent, more good and beautiful than me.A little while ago I read this post from the lovely woman over at Scissortail Silk, about we aren't each other's competition, not one more standard to measure against in this already overmeasured world.And I am fired up and I start this post, my blog says, at the end of March. I think, we are not competing, and I wanted to write and say it out loud, that we, the bakers and butchers and lawyers and authors and midwives, we are all in the ragged band of beautiful making our way towards heaven.We are all, I want to tell you, the raw art, the rare creation. We are all, not in the diluted universals we always use, but in the particular concentration of mitochondrial DNA and endless cells recombining and holding us together, in the concentrated, intense, fiercest way - we are all and each the uniqueness we cannot fathom.I wanted to say this when I first read those true words - we are not each other's competition - but somewhere I lost the message. I went out into the world thinking I had the voice of a prophet and I still preached a fear of the bathroom scale. I still proclaimed scarcity.It can be hard to remember that the work of becoming well is a series of hills you fall down, and the falling and rising, they live together. And so I marched out in March thinking I could wear the banner of the not-competition, and it is May, and I am still sewing the pieces together.But here is what I know, what I preach next to you, in my nervous ponytail making our way through the jungle of the kingdom of God:God is too particular about us to compare.God is too intent on us, on the molecules of being, on how we move and lie down and arise, to watch the numbers at the gym and mark us in a rank of better to worse, against each other.If it is true that God wrestled with Jacob, if it is true that Jesus appeared to Mary and called her name, Mary, like that, each syllable resounding with news of the resurrection and life -then we cannot be competing.Because as Jesus calls her Mary, so Jesus calls me Hilary. So Jesus calls you, calls the striker and the first string center forward, calls the Zumba class ladies and the lawyers and butchers and authors.If God is really wrestling with each of us, our bones pressing against God, our lungs stretched to keep breathing the air that gives the life as we wrestle with the Lifegiver,then we are not competing.We are each the beloved, particular, wrestlers with God.We are each the remarkable made alive again.We are each so singularly loved that God laughs at our comparisons, touches our hip socket with His laughter.And so shall I be delivered.Love,hilary

this is a place of remembrance

"I AM DONE WITH THIS!" I scream it over and over, part hysterically crying, part hyperventilating, the oxygen fighting to enter my body. "I am done. I am done. I am. DONE." Who am I talking to, on the drive back to campus to charge my now-dead phone? What am I talking about?Is it the ever present shadow of bride to be workouts, the ticker of the treadmill and the stairmaster, the well meaning tight lipped smiles of the people in the gym all out to prove we love our bodies, love ourselves, have the balance, have the motivation, the stamina?And the way that I tell myself that 382 calories is insufficient for an afternoon, add up the numbers, spend them again and again, streams of numbers divided and earned, calculated on the drive from Starbucks to work and home again, and so I climb stairs for an extra ten minutes because you must, you must, be above 400 every time. You must or else what is the point and do you know what will happen, the wild collapse?"I am done with this" - with what?With the endless looping ribbons of thought about whether it is worth writing a blog post about something as small as climbing stairs at the gym on a Wednesday, that who needs or wants to read such a thing, with the frustration that even when I start to write it I want to tell it better, that there is some other voice asking if this is the right word choice, if I would get more traffic by using some other words, if I got to the Jesus part of this quicker then I would be a better blogger, a better writer, a better Hilary.With the frustration that there is no clean telling of a story that I live in my skin and bones with oxygen that still fights to enter my body and leave it, the most common of journeys, the most transforming of journeys. With how much I have paused and deleted and revisited, thinking I will find a new ending if I hit "save" enough times.There is a Jesus part to this. There is a part about God. But I can't run there because when I run there I get pushed back into the hurricane. We have arenas of salvation, arenas of sanctification, Julie told me once. This is mine: that I am not allowed to run from the fact that I struggle, wonder, worry, count and obsess and overplan how to keep my body in the form I have chosen as right enough (but always, the enough, because there must be room for improvement, there must be more zumba classes and more pilates and more of everything else that might make me better). This is the arena of sanctification, me and God in the ring, wrestling as much with each other as with the bystanders, the voices offering those classes and the quick fixes.Didn't Jacob call the place Peniel, where he encountered God and yet his life was delivered? And wasn't it there a striving with God? And wasn't there the fierceness of blessing, the ache for it, every muscle overworked with the longing?And I build a place of remembrance between my dashboard and my heart, a remembering that somehow my life is preserved. That's the Jesus part to this story. That when I drive away from the overcounting and the oxygen fights with my body for permission to breathe again is that this whole post is a wrestling. This whole story is a wrestling.A day after I scream there is a cancelled appointment, an idea in my head that I'll go to an extra class, fit in one more day at the gym, an email to my father to ask if he can bring the gym bag I left behind with him, and not five minutes later his head pokes around the door to say he is already here, he can't go back for it.Who will say this is not all a wrestling?Nor this writing my own place of remembering that my life is being delivered?

to the girls in my college classrooms

Dear girls who walk along the pathways and hallways at my college,Dear women who fill these walls and ceilings with your ideas and questions,Dear hearts that are so full they feel like bursting,I see you. Right where you are. I catch these glimpses of you on my way to and from the student dining hall. I see you scrunched over papers. I see you holding back tears in tight-lipped smiles to the many people who you pass on your way to chemistry. I see you stray a glance in my direction, see me in all my appearing-put-together-as-a-young-professional, and sigh a little in your shoulders. I see you blink and brush past your day, all worried, always worried that there isn't enough of you, enough of time, enough of effort or fullness or beauty.Right where you are? It's all kinds of hard. Before you tell me that if you only worked harder, if you only sucked it up more, if you only tried to be more cheerful, more in shape, less complaining. Before you tell me you need to get into the Word more, spend more quiet time or homework time or something else, or something else...Before that - it is hard.The hard that it is cannot be measured or calculated, cannot be judged, cannot be lined up next to everyone else and compared. It is all its own, it is aching, and it is raw, and it is real. And some days you forget that it is hard; and some days everything you do is a reminder.If I can tell you anything, as the girl you think is put together, as the person you're not sure even knows what you're talking about -oh love, I just want to wrap you up in a little extra love for yourself today. I want to tell you that the answer is not in trying harder to be better or to be perfect or to fit into the space you worry you don't fit into.The answer isn't in more activities or more to-do lists, more reprimands for yourself, more scolding. The answer isn't in staying up later to finish that paper or study as hard as you think you should study for that test.Can I just give you a hug? Because you, right where you are, right in the middle of the hard, you are wildly lovely and to be cherished. Someone told me the other day that I am intimidating, because it always seems like I have it together. So here are a few confessions, from me, the girl who wants you to believe that she is perfect and the girl who knows she isn't, the girl who deeper down than her perfect, wants you to know she is real:I cry in my office at work when I realize there is a typo in something I just handed in.Some days I drive into work thinking about all the mean things I want to say to people.Sometimes I lie in bed watching Castle or Hart of Dixie instead of reading books that would make me intellectually sophisticated, because I really just want to lie in bed watching TV.I cry in my car after a long run. I avoid mirrors because of the way I'm convinced my stomach looks. I'd rather eat a cupcake and a cheeseburger than a salad. I have gotten into trouble with boys, trouble without boys, trouble about boys. I've done stupid. I've done selfish. More than I admit.I get mad at God. I don't spend all that much time in the Word. I went to church last week and cried the whole way through and didn't sing the hymns and went home and moped around.I haven't got it all together. I'm a mess sitting here writing this to you, but when I see you on campus, with your brightness and your beautiful heart and the way you listen and the way you love, I have to write to you. I have to tell you, dear hearts, that it is okay to be in the hard. It's okay not to know where to go from here.I even think it's okay to sit down right in the middle of it, and whisper, "I have been spent."I'll come sit next to you and give you a hug. And in the middle of it all, where we sit, I think God will come sit down with us. Because He wants to be with the real us. Because He loves the real.Love,hilary