I sing him to sleep

This is the irrational season, where love blooms bright and wild.That's Madeleine L'Engle, about Christmas. We're in November now. I've lived a lifetime in a hospital, a lifetime where the seasons changed, we bought jeans at Target because we hadn't come prepared for fall. A lifetime where we learned to lean hard on each other - I'll prep the suction, you hold his trach - a lifetime of doing this while kissing Jack's head and telling him funny stories, making faces, laughing the dark away. A lifetime of backpacks and diaperbags we can't quite tell apart, of writing philosophy in the dark, reading Til We Have Faces and For the Life of the World while our son sleeps, swaddled tight, a smile flickering across his face as he dreams.This is the irrational season.--When my nephew was born two years ago, I went out to visit him around two months. While my sister took a shower and did some things around the house, I held him. He fussed, as babies do; I did the only thing I could think. I put on Norah Jones and I sang him while I swayed around their kitchen.When I was a senior in college I swayed a baby around the hotel room singing "Winter Song" by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson on repeat for 182 times, according to my computer. Her mom was speaking at the conference, and I was babysitting; she fell asleep after play 68, but I listened on. It was the first time I imagined my own someday dance - the living room, the late night, the baby that would belong to me, I to him or her.And the Sundays after college when I was searching for myself, I returned to be with the littlest ones, scooping them up as I sang the old hymns, stepping between toys, between other children. I sang the words that were my ropes, my anchors on the water. I swayed and sang a year of Sundays.--When I was pregnant with Jack, there were days that I thought the world had left me behind. I used to say that something in me died, that my expectations died, those long 20 weeks after his diagnosis. What could be the same? I remembered singing Sara and Ingrid and I remembered singing Norah and I remembered the old hymns and I once walked a mile along the river weeping because it seemed I would never be the mother I imagined myself to be.I was wrong. A fallow field has not died. It is only being emptied for the fullness that is coming. It is being made ready. And my heart is a field God laid fallow - for there was not enough room in me for my expectations and my son. There would not be enough room for the kind of love I prayed to give him.In the irrational season, God makes the fields fallow. God widens the spaces where love must enter. I never stopped believing that God was good. But only now do I see my way to believing that God’s goodness extends to this work – to widen my heart for the wonder that is my son.--Jack loves when I sing Norah Jones. He looks up at me, grabs at my hair, falls asleep and nestles deep in my arms. I sing him the old hymns, “This is my Father’s World,” and “Alleluia, Sing to Jesus,” I sing him the stories, the songs of meeting his dad and driving through early mornings along route 97. I sing Sara and Ingrid. I sing, my voice catching in my throat. The joy sears along my vocal chords, stitching into me the words, the look on my son’s face, the singing.--I tell God that there is so much I wanted to give Jack that I can’t.God smiles. Nothing was lost that Jack was always meant to have. I tell God that there is so much I thought would be different than it is.God smiles. Your heart is wide enough now. I tell God this is the irrational season.God smiles. Love is blooming, deep and wild. --If you are looking for me, I am singing my son to sleep.Love,hilary

dear hilary: if the impossible is true

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

the gift is given

It's a slow morning, the kind that you take a long time to wake up fully, not sure if your dream has shifted into sunlight or if you're still in the midst of it. There is a quiet to this kind of morning and an unrest, too, and the heart is full, always, achingly, full.I've been trying to sit with the Bible more lately. I'm a lover of the liturgy, prayer book guidance to the Word. I'm more likely to trust what someone else appoints for me to read than I am to trust my gut telling me where I need to go. So when I sit, alone for a few moments, on the familiar porch, and God says, read about washing the disciples' feet, I'm almost too quick to resist it.Isn't that always the giveaway? We find a reason not to, a reason it's out of order or our sermon series has us meditating on something else, we must consult a calendar and a guide to be in the Word the right way?So I slink towards John, chapter 13.And Jesus got up from the table.He got up from the table and took off his outer robe and took a basin and knelt and washed their feet. These, whom he loved until the end, these, whom he cherished. These, who knew so little about what they had seen. These scattered sheep. He washed their feet."You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."I am only the first few steps along the cracked cement of understanding, and I'm holding my arms out to balance myself as I read out loud these words.So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. Is there anything more beautiful?Is there anything more precious than this? That we were taught by his way of living. That we were known in the washing of our feet, and this morning I need Jesus to wash my feet again.I need Jesus to show me how he will come into the midst of everything that is still a mess inside me and he will hold it tenderly, he will change it, he will do this wild act of grace on my heart and set me free. I need Jesus to make the lesson alive in the doing of it, not just the thinking or the idea-making or the understanding-seeking that so often and so quickly becomes misunderstanding. It wasn't about the prayer book appointed reading today, it was about Jesus coming to me and taking off his robe and washing my feet.And I do not understand one thing about this love but that it is gift and it has been given to me.These mornings I go to the Word because the Word is life because the Word is a lifeline in the days where the joy meets the ache and it collides in my heart. These mornings I sit and shrink away but I keep going back because I am sold out to this Jesus, who washes the disciples' feet, who tells us again and again to love as he loved us, we whom he calls friends, not servants. I go back, again and again, to King Jesus because King Jesus is life, because he is freedom, because he is the fullness of beauty, because he knows me.And I do not understand one thing about Jesus' love but that it is gift, it is washing my feet, it is meeting me on my familiar porch, with such tenderness, with such freedom. It is gift, and it has been given.Love,hilary

love on a sunday afternoon

It's Sunday afternoon and the haze of sleep is settling over us both. I feel my limbs heavy, asking for a moment or two to close eyes and breathe deeper and rest, find a moment in the chaotic joy of seeing him again to sleep. At first I fight it - we only get so many days, and I want to be awake for them, I want every moment with this man who in the airport late on a Friday night makes my whole heart swell in my chest at the sight of him, who catches me and kisses me in baggage claim, in front of everyone, and pulls away only to hug me closer to him. Because that embrace is home.But two days later and the cold I've been trying to ward off won't budge, wants time to move through and around my body, and my body politely insists on sleep. We sit on the couch on the porch, in the cold October sunshine, and I put my feet across his lap and he sits reading a commentary on Genesis and he piles more blankets on me to be sure I'm not cold, to be sure I'm peaceful. I feel his steady breathing, the rise and fall of it. There is a silent joy among the birds and branches, the leaves descend towards their winter resting place and a car pulls in the driveway and someone goes to the grocery store and someone else comes home from a different church activity, and we sit on the porch and I fall asleep.I think this must be the look of care - how we become unhurried with each other. How there is enough time to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon in October, despite my protest that long distance makes every moment of closeness to him seem impossibly short (so why would I sleep it away). How it is his voice that tells me, tickling my ear, that I am, in fact, tired, and I do, in fact, need to sleep. And it is his hand that drifts across my ankles in the gesture of care. Reminding me of his presence, reminding me that there is enough time in the long journey together.I don't know how to describe it, or why I would try to fill words with the unutterably beautiful feeling of falling asleep next to him on a Sunday afternoon late in the day when the sun is dripping gold across the tops of the trees. Perhaps all I wanted this to say was that the look of care, the way care moves, is not what I expected before I met him. Before I might have told you that care was bold and grand and sweep-you-off-your-feet, that it was a wild trumpeting kind of thing, that everyone saw and noticed and gaped at. And I do run towards him and kiss him in the airport and we do laugh and cry and hug each other -and then on a Sunday two days later he astounds me by sitting on the porch with me and reading while I take a nap. He astounds me with the gentleness of care, with the simplicity of it, with the way that love moves, unhurried, from one to another and back again.Care is quiet and full and this morning, I close my eyes and miss him and remember the slow Sunday afternoon. How this must have been what I was longing for:  such astonishing every day love.Love,hilary

dear hilary: be braver

Dear Hilary,I just watched the Brené Brown video - the one about being vulnerable, people who live wholeheartedly? Do you know that one? Her Ted Talk? I want to know how you have learned about doing that in your life so far? How do you live vulnerably?Love,Un-vulnerable in SeattleDear Un-vulnerable,I've watched that video a bunch of times in the last few months. It was a suggestion from my counselor, and, like most of her suggestions, it was a good one. When I first saw it, I was sitting in my office at work and worrying about something (I'm a bit of a worrier, I'll confess). I was eating these really good cookie things I got in the grocery store, 2 boxes for $5, and they promised to be very nutritious and give me hours and hours of energy as well as fill me with the sweet taste of hydrogenated blueberry (I promise, actually, they're really good). As I munched, I worried, and Brené talked, and I thought about vulnerability and shame and courage and those words I'm so fond of and so very not good at living by.This year, the year of 22? I have learned that I am braver than I thought I was. I have also learned that being brave is more about being braver - about the growing from one kind of brave to another, far more than it is about the thing itself.I want to start with being braver than I thought I was. I go on runs sometimes - you probably know this from my blog - and when I run, I talk. I talk to God, I talk to the birds, I talk even a little bit to myself. And the things I say are brave not because they are difficult, but because they are gracious. "I love my body," I said one summer afternoon. "I have done a good job at work this week," I said as I rounded the muddy right turn in the path behind the college buildings, the one that leads to my favorite pond. "God, Your goodness is bigger than my idea of it," was the thought last week as I ran hands up through a cul-de-sac praying for a sign from Him. These things are brave: because they are words of love instead of judgment, words of a recovering good girl who now believes that her job is not to hurl condemnation at her legs or her work ethic or her relationship with God, but instead to say things in love. That's brave.Brave looks like wearing bright blue pants on a Friday night, like eating Ben & Jerry's from the carton, like whispering to your best friend that you do not know if you can believe that you are worthy. Yes, un-vulnerable, brave is in the work of admitting all the places where you ache. This year, my year of 22, I have learned that to be brave is to walk into a room and, for just a moment, believe that all things work together for the good.And then that oh-s0-much-more-important thing: in this, my 22nd year, I learned that it is not about achieving a level of brave all for its own sake. It's not about an arbitrary measurement, where you suddenly are brave enough, where you have arrived at a satisfactory level... Oh no. Being brave is for something else: for love, for the truth, for the sake of the bigger, richer life that you must seek. You must not seek it for merely self-actualization: you must seek it because to be alive is a great and grave privilege. But being brave is more about being brave in the direction of the other things you seek. Therefore, it is a movement, a blossoming. One day you manage to say to your abs that you love them. One day you pray and release. One day, in the middle of the day, you watch the Ted Talk again and you say to yourself, I want to live wholeheartedly, too. And that is brave. And that is braver.Living vulnerably is not a thing to be achieved, my dear friend. It is more a striving to live according to the great privilege it is to be alive, a striving to offer your fullest self because you believe that self is so radiant, so very real, that to offer less is to be less. It is a striving, a blossoming, a becoming.In this, my 22nd year, I am beginning to strive. I am beginning to hope that I will be braver now than I was three years ago and braver in twenty years than I am in ten years, and all the while, seeking not merely bravery or courage or vulnerability: seeking instead the good, wondrous life.That's what I know about being vulnerable, Un-vulnerable: yours is a good and wondrous life. Be brave in its direction.Love,hilary

i go running

It's been almost a year - a long while, a longer journey, when I wrote a letter to my friend Preston about a run I went on. In that post, I wondered about how God is glorious. How God gets right near us, and asks us, "What are you doing here, Hilary?" and how on that particular run I responded, arms flung wide in front of people passing me by, "I'm here for You."It's been a winding road since that blog post, since that run. When I stepped onto the trail yesterday afternoon, I couldn't feel the glory. I willed myself to praise Him - to say thank you for sun and warmth, to sing out next to birds and crickets, to imagine that all the beauty, it is a sign of the brightness. Of the light.But I didn't really want to do it, and so I gave way to a smaller heart and even smaller thoughts. All of this is unfair, you know, God. I don't see your plan for me. What happened to that promise I made you all those months ago?I might have said thank you to God, but I think my heart said a lot more of, but still... I felt, suddenly, how I must be caught in the thicket of my own heart, tangled in its desire, lost in its fear. I felt the way it must look to God: me chasing around after thoughts, trying to follow them to their logical or beautiful conclusion, following plans until they disappear back beyond my horizon line, running in circles hoping that I'd free myself of the confusion and the mess.And His gift to me was a run. A real, physical, sweaty, sun-beaming down on my oh-so-pale skin run. A run behind the woods I've become almost so familiar with I miss how extraordinarily beautiful they are. A run around the ponds, past the water, past the white ducks, past the trembling, tentative green leaves. A run up hills and over tree stumps. A run that asked me to pour out my real physical effort, to strive and challenge, to waste no more breath on thoughts but instead drink in the oxygen for the basic, beautiful purpose of breathing.His gift was that I went on a run. And as I ran, my voice quieted. I didn't have the physical breath to complain... I couldn't tell Him just what I think of this, just what I worry about, just what He hasn't answered and how it's been year and didn't you promise me that if I became yours I would have... and do... and be understood...I went on a run that put real ache in my muscles and real air in my lungs. It made everything physical again, and I heard that it is a gift to have bodies. A gift, to get tired and sweaty. A gift, to be pushing yourself up a long hill breathing in the scent of almost spring, a gift that all we think, all we yearn for, lives inside a body. A body that can run. A body that can carry me when I caught in the thicket of my heart.Yesterday, my body could sing louder praise than my words. Yesterday, it was my muscles and lungs that held onto His promises far more than anything I could think or feel or speak.And His gift was that I went running.Love,hilary