when I find dirt on my wedding shoes

I had a plan for my wedding shoes, even before Preston proposed to me. I'd seen them in a magazine the previous Christmas and in so many wedding Pinterest pictures. They were the perfect color pink - ballet pink, the kind that's gentle but strong and not too flashy but not too pale - made of what look like satin ribbons, flat but elegant. I've wanted to be graceful like a ballerina for a long time (far longer than I actually studied ballet, I should admit), and these were the shoes I imagined wearing.They fit perfectly, and I kept them in their box without ever touching them or wearing them. I would show them off in hushed whispers, the tissue paper crinkling, slip them on for no more than ten minutes and always inside. I couldn't imagine ever wearing them anywhere - they were the thing I thought would make me beautiful.--And today I was cleaning our closet on a whim listening to the rain outside and I tried on my wedding shoes again, just to see. I don't know if any of us are very far from thinking beautiful things are magic, and so I stood amid the dust and the old scarves and the sweaters and I slipped them on.They fit perfectly.They're covered in dirt.I began a lament, half-formed the words on my tongue and half whispered them to the mirror, looking up and down and wondering where all this dirt had come from, if I should put them somewhere safer than in the midst of all my other ordinary shoes, as if they should be kept safe from my ordinary life, from my growing self.--But I couldn't stop looking, noticing, and then I realized: the dirt makes them beautiful.The dirt is the witness to the growing of a young marriage, the beginning, the glorious running through the world and the slowing down, the catching each other, the catching ourselves, the being constantly caught up in God. They're bearing the marks of marriage: the almost five months, the honeymoon where we got tattoos and the wandering through the grounds of my high school where we got married, the scuffs of grass from down by the river where we walked in the haze of a Texas summer. I can squint and see the mystery green pen marks I tried to erase with a Tide pen now permanently etched at their edges. They're wearing history now, a bit of rainwater, worn from being stamped in frustration or impatience. And they wear the history of love, how different and the same it is, how easy it is to forget that love is always moving in wild uncontrollable circles, bringing more people in, bringing you closer to the one you love, sealing the ark and the ache of marriage with every click of the lock and every first peek of sun too early in the morning.--We tell ourselves to make memories because time goes too fast, to take pictures, to Skype every detail back home lest we lose sight of who we are or were or could become.But perhaps our lives are already bearing witness to it. Perhaps it is we who are too worried to notice that the rest of our ordinary is holding and bearing to us the story of us, of our marriage and jobs and moves and fights and triumphs. Perhaps our shoes, even those we were so afraid to touch, are beautiful when we let them wear and retell our stories.Perhaps the dirt on my wedding shoes is a better storyteller of this hallowed beginning than I can hope to be.And perhaps, I should stand still in the perfect pink shoes now flecked grey and brown and that funny hint of green in my closet on a Saturday and listen.The story they tell is so beautiful.Love,hilary

when I learn something about valor

Eshet chayil - woman of valor.I turn the question over this morning on my way through the frosted trees. The sun is slow to rise this morning, unruly, as if it, too, is tired after the snowfall last night. I sip the gingerbread latte - my nod to the season, to the red Starbucks cups, to the closeness of Christmas. I don't know why I'm wondering about this phrase in particular - woman of valor - but I know about it from the women that start to come to mind - Nish, and Sarah, Lisa-Jo, and Rachel, Ann, Antonia, Elora - and then I realize I know them from across my life, not just across the threads of connection, electricity firing across miles to bring our words to each other.I know them in my mother, wisdom spilling out as she leans back across the end of my bed and reminds me of the way that we are meant to trust God. I know them in my sister, who texts me to remind me she is here and loves me, who raises her son with such patience and grace that I am sometimes speechless at it. I know it in the women who have colored and changed my life by their knowing me - from breakfasts sophomore year to Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping at the Pentagon City Mall to a walk in the woods and tea on her couch to hours of talk about racial reconciliation and education and what it must mean to love God and to believe that we are to know Jesus by what we do with our hands.And I could not stop thinking about it, the words sounding over and over again in my head. Eshet chayil - woman of valor.How do you become a woman of valor? How do you become the fiercer truth-teller, the wiser grace-giver, the woman who spills out light wherever you walk because you cannot help but do that?Because she is brave, this woman of valor. She will wear red lipstick on a too-early morning and put on a blue puffer coat to shovel the walk. She will stand in front of the room and teach. She will preach the truth over coffee or wine, across the sale racks at the consignment shop or in her office with mugs of tea in front of you and rain outside. She will strike out on her own to chase down a dream in New York, in California. She will sing Sara Bareilles in the car and pull up next to a man in a large truck, who will stare at her and laugh, and she will be unashamed. She is brave. She takes the time with you, again and again, to work out the trembling bits, to ask every question or none at all, and she reminds you that there is nothing for it but to live deep and wide and full, wherever you are. She is unafraid of the truth and unafraid to chase it down, across the mountains and rivers, in the hardest moments, in the lightest ones.I know so many women of valor, I realize. I wonder if they know that they are. I wonder if they know, sitting at the table in Panera or drinking tea in my office or driving in my car on our way back from coffee. I wonder if they know, who have taught me the way grace feels and moves in a life, have taught me that being brave is worth it, in their questions and their laughter and the way they love.I pull my car into the parking space, cut the engine, let the song finish playing from the speakers. I wonder if becoming a woman of valor has something to do with hope, with singing along with Sara and reading the good words of the women who have taught me what valor looks like.Maybe I can begin in the hope to be more like them. To learn the shape of their kindness, their graciousness, their fierce love of the truth. Their courage.I  begin in the smaller prayer, just as I walk up the steps to begin my day. Lord, might you make me a woman of valor?Love,hilary

i begin again

courage: to tell your story with your whole heart.we can't practice compassion with other people until we are kind to ourselves. This. It's this I have avoided and pretended not to know.But compassion -is a result of authenticity -of vulnerability.Nothing less.To have a compassionate imagination, as one friend named my dearest ambition over swirling wine glasses and chocolate cake, to walk into another person's very story- that takes the kind of gentleness we cannot know until we have done it. And we cannot do it without beginning at ourselves.I typed this blog post weeks ago, when I first discovered what felt at the time to be the most revolutionary, inspiring, terrifying, truthful talk I had ever heard. Brene Brown told her audience (and me) on her Ted talk that we cannot begin to be compassionate, to build connection, to grow in love, unless we are vulnerable.Really, she said, the people who live wholehearted don't think about whether vulnerability is particularly good or bad; they simply recognize that it is necessary.But last night I didn't want it to be necessary.I didn't want to build anymore. I didn't want to be vulnerable, to walk around with my thoughts on a blog or in the air against the black sky flecked with a lazy snowstorm. I didn't want to think anymore about whether I tell half the truth or the whole truth, whether there is a window into my heart or not.Sometimes the courage meets the hard place and the messy place and it seems to evaporate. Sometimes the Wednesday night heading home at 10:45 makes you think those words about authenticity and vulnerability are just words on a page without any reality, any connection to you, any roots.And maybe that's okay.Maybe it's okay to begin there. To begin again, there.Some days you hear beautiful and true things and you don't want them to be beautiful or true, and you begin there. Some days, you build bird by bird, brick by brick, and you have to pause and admit to yourself that bricks and birds are not always easy. And you begin there. And if you, wherever you are, find your courage meeting the harder places, find your eyes and arms a little weary, find your beginning in the bird by bird -I'm with you.We begin here.Love,hilary