when I choose the economy of God

"So, I guess you're going to have to figure out three things."This is my husband, in the still, dark room where we sit and write with the rain outside and the quiet inside. He's talking about gratitude, something I'm resisting, and I don't have a good reason, I should tell you that right now.Actually, I should tell you that I have some bad reasons.In the economy of an anxious heart, your minus columns are always outlasting your positive ones. In the economy of a perfectionist heart, a minor dip in expected performance is the 1929 crash of Wall Street. A lower grade than you expected of yourself or a missed opportunity to make friends with someone or some nice thing you can't quite put your finger on but you're sure you failed to do. You name it for yourself and suddenly it is another thing you've forgotten, and you work and live on an ever steepening incline of failure, and somewhere along the way you're also drowning in your own misunderstanding of yourself, and you've mixed your metaphors together so you are a drowning person climbing a mountain with a top you can't reach, pushing a rock maybe, like Sisyphus, or maybe just pushing yourself, hauling yourself up and up and up and already you are sure you have been defeated.That's me sometimes. I don't know if it's ever you, but it is me. It is me when the grades and the papers and the research ideas come back with critique or comment or areas for improvement. It is me in the quiet fights and the loud ones. It is me lying in bed on a random Saturday morning cataloguing the friends I haven't caught up with lately or the places I have not brought peace or the way I should have and could have and would have been a better me.--The economy of God looks nothing like the economy of my anxious heart.The economy of God is God coming towards us, promising abundant generosity for the laborers who work an hour and those who work a full day. It is a strange, terrifying generosity, the kind that makes my neat columns of deserving and undeserving and the weight and sift of my measurements look foolish. The kind that puts us to shame in our race to merit and earn, but rescues us in the midst of it too. God laughs, I imagine, and sets us free.--Once my counselor asked me what the big bad was that would happen if I didn't win. If I didn't get perfect grades or perfect GRE scores or a perfect record of performances. I still don't know the answer to that question. I think that was her point.--I want the economy of God. I want the economy of generosity, the economy of grace. I want the rescue from drowning my way up a mountain I can't ever finish climbing, the setting free. I want the economy that will force me to give up my pride in making each and every thing perfect, my disappointment at myself when things aren't just as I would like them. I want Jesus, in the end, whatever it might cost me and my well-worn anxious heartbeat.And so I do have to figure out three things, write a story that is full of the richness of a generosity I didn't earn, full of receiving blessing where I can't say my goodness or my rightness is the reason, but the only reason is the sufficient reason is that God loves. That's the new story. God loves, and the richness of the story is there. I'm caught up into it, and set free by it, and this is the better story.Preston asked me for three things. I won't tell you what they are, but I'm thinking I might keep a journal somewhere, and start writing them down.And so in a little way, widen my welcome of the most wondrous love.Love,hilary

dear hilary: when strength is hard-fought

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

unless you bless me

I will not let you go unless you bless me.How long did those hours stretch, Jacob to a stranger's flesh, clinging tighter as his muscles weakened, felt the strain of his back and hands and arms and still he held onto the belief that he would not let go, unless.Unless you bless me.Once in an Orthodox Church I was told the story of how Mary entered the temple as a child, how she ran to the Holy of Holies without any fear, how it seemed to recognize and welcome her, who would become the bearer of Christ to the world. I stood beneath the playtetera, the icon of Mary stretched in prayer. I imagine her like Jacob, muscles flexed and strained under the weight of such open hands, such reaching and presenting of Jesus to the world. I imagine her muscles ached with faithfulness, with that clinging of behold all nations shall call me blessed.I used to promise God I'd stop asking to be blessed because I thought prayer was an ever-interceding for another. I told God my prayers were too selfish as they were, too centered on me, on a desperate desire to be better known and better know, my small muscles clinging beneath white dresses or ripped jeans or running shorts, anxious for a blessing. But I imagined prayer like a laundry list I had to keep track of, each tick of another person's name off my tongue a checkmark, a satisfactory nod from the One who cannot be named - so I kept away from asking to be blessed. I kept away from asking for guidance, except my muscles returned again and again to Jacob's posture, then to Mary's, always aching with the desire to be closer.I told God it wasn't right, that prayer was about others, not ourselves, that it was pious of me to put my knees to the floor and name the gifts given, pray for the family and the house and the friendships and the broken bits and pieces of other stories. I thought myself good at praying in those days, when words tripped off my tongue, eloquent and sweet.And then last week on Sunday I read the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, alone in the night, and how Jacob held on, though his hip was out of joint, and how he said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And as I stood there, my voice joined in that mysterious way to Jacob's, my hands found their way to stretch open like Mary's -we can wrestle, pray wide into the spaces in our own hearts for a deeper knowing, for muscles that ache with faithfulness, for hands that open towards heaven.And not let go.Love,hilary

God is not an if-then God

Oh friend, listen close. I've got this story that I'm bursting to tell you.I'm bursting to tell us, because, you see... I want to tell you a story about grace. I want to tell you that "God is not an if-then blesser."I was on the phone when I heard myself say it. I was fiddling with the earrings on my mom's dresser, thinking about the way they caught the light, the way they felt like pebbles and glass in my hand, the sharp prick of the metal backing- and I said it."God is not an if then blesser."And the truth of it stared back at me- that this, this is the beautiful thing about grace in our lives. God does not ask for only the one path, the perfect walk, the right words always at the right times and the best choices and the best, well, everything. No, our God pours blessing over so much more. Over you and me in all our failing. Over the choices we regret. Over the ones we cherish.He blesses because that is who He is. Oh, friend, can I dig this deep into our skin and write it across our foreheads, and remind us when we sit in silence in the face of our choices and how much we fear they will be, not only wrong, but without blessing?God blesses because He loves us.God blesses because He calls this world good and He dwells in it and His dwelling is blessing, and the blessing is uncontainable and mysterious and more constant than you or me or what we do.This is a story about grace. This is about us coming out of the cage of perfect, of trying til we bleed to guess what He wants us to do because we are scared to lose something God is so eager to give us. He doesn't need us to try to calculate our way into His heart.He just needs us to come running, carrying our choices like pebbles in front of us, our faces alight with His light. He is a God of blessing.He is the God of grace.tell me that doesn't begin to sing a little freedom into your heart? I'm singing next to you. Love,Hilary