when I meet an old companion

I wake up to my daughter's smile, her face scrunched up in joy in the still-dark room, waiting for me to come and begin the day. My limbs feel unusually heavy, as though the room were made of water and I am trying to stay afloat as I swim towards the crib. I'm just tired, I tell myself, though a thought flickers that this is not an unfamiliar feeling.The sunshine freckles my skin as I plop down on the brown, dead grass of our backyard. It's slowly freckling too, green blades creeping in, as relentless as time itself. The sky is a harshly beautiful blue, my son is laughing and signing to me to "please come here," as he chases the big purple ball I've kicked to the end of the yard. I don't know how to get up and do it again. My daughter is sleeping next to me, her green frog pacifier tucked under her arm. I don't know how I can love them more. I don't know how I can keep moving.I stopped taking my antidepressant almost exactly a year ago, when June had first made her arrival known, the two pink lines greeting me after I washed my hands and already concluded we weren't pregnant. I lived tenderly on the edge for her first 12 weeks, awaiting a resounding hearbeat. I stopped my antidepressant, and as the nausea of weaning off Cymbalta gave way to the nausea of June's furious activity, her cells splitting and replicating and building, I told myself that the chapter was finished.But postpartum depression, I discover, is not a finished chapter of a finished book; it's a thread already bound to a thousand others, it is a stream flowing relentlessly to the river, to the sea. I want my life to come in discrete increments, one at a time, I want the neatness of pages that read only one way, left to right, put behind me once and forever.And somehow every metaphor, every analogy, every image I create when writing this is driven by something like movement, connection, the way that things wind through our lives in predictable and unexpected ways.I'll be honest. Writing this is hard for me. When June was born there was a small seed of triumph that hadn't yet been blown away by the wind. I believed I had conquered depression, even though conquering never felt like the right metaphor. I held my daughter and she breathed slow and lovely against my chest and I thought something was finished with everything she began.But the thread of post-partum depression runs through these days and I follow it into the shower, where I tell God I have nothing left for my children even though it's only 11am and there are hours left to fill. I follow it into the kitchen, where food is like a calculus problem my brain can't solve. I follow it onto the back porch, where the sun is still as warm as ever and my bones don't feel it reach them. And I pray, because I believe in prayer, but I don't know what to ask for. Depression doesn't feel to me like an accidental shadow I need God to rearrange. Depression doesn't seem like a mountain I am asking God to move out of my way so that I can proceed, as if the depression and I were not bound together, and there was a me and a depression and it was simply in my way, a temporary aberration.So I pray for God to give me the ability to swim it, to climb it, to move with and through it. I pray for God to make depression luminous with a light that has already conquered deeper darknesses. I pray for a way to build a bridge that is also a raft that is also a rope that is also a ladder that is also the next metaphor and its answer. I pray for God to make this a place of encounter. I pray for God to show up and accompany me through it, accompany my children and my husband and my friends and those whom my depression touches even in unseen ways.I pray for a fierce friendship with joy, for eyes that wake to a smiling girl and a jumping boy and for muscles that remember these attitudes even when my brain doesn't.This is not a finished chapter, or even a finished blog post. This is a step into the river, a traced outline in a tapestry. There is more to discovered. May Jesus walk into the midst of it.Love,hilary

grace, a year later (sharing at Christie Purifoy's)

I get the chance to share a piece at one of my very favorite writers, Christie Purifoy. Her book wrapped me up in a new way to see the seasons, in the world, in my life, in this always-beginning relationship with God, anew. It has meant so much to me, and I'm honored to share at her space today. Join me?Here is a little excerpt:I was all grace-less worry the first six weeks of my son’s life. He was born into the bright steadying lights of the NICU. He was born into weeks of poking, prodding, scoped up and down. His first pictures besides our Instagram snapshots were the flickery black and white of heart and head and kidney ultrasounds.Two by two, we would go into that ark, my husband and I. Two by two, and no more than that at a time. In the mornings the attending physicians and residents would form a crescent moon standing around his bassinet, and the real moon would take the night watch alongside us.We are all born into motherhood. The labor is from us, and for us, and so I too was welcomed by bright lights and pulsing blue and red monitors. I too was born into an endless click, click of blood pressure cuffs and kinked IV needles and blanket forts to hide us while we slept.Keep reading, over at Christie's?Love,hilary

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

when it has been 20 weeks

Dear Jackson,You have a name! You love to remind us with every ultrasound visit that you are a boy, and the name belongs to you in the best way - it's been yours for so long. I love using it when we're on the go, you and I, grading papers or dancing in the kitchen or sitting on the porch, just being. I love talking to you with your name, Jackson, rolling off my tongue.This week we learned a little bit more about you, Jackson. We learned different things from different places - a phone call and a follow-up detailed ultrasound and a genetic counseling appointment. It's been a lot, but I think you probably know and feel my hand over the place where you're moving, that sense of change in the air, new plans, new preparations.You've got a facial cleft. From what we have learned so far, it extends up from your lip and involves your right eye and that side of your nose, and it goes back into your palate too. It happens sometimes; our bodies do unexpected things.You have some unique things ahead, Jackson. We are so grateful that we know now, when you're still wiggling around showing off your arms and legs, letting us hear your strong heartbeat. We are grateful because we can start to make sure we are ready to take care of you when we finally meet you this fall. And every single person who comes into the world needs taking care of. Me, your dad, the people who will meet you and take care of you in the hospital in September, the people at church, your grandparents. You will need some particular things - you'll need help eating, maybe with breathing at the beginning, and the doctors will do some really amazing things to help you with the cleft so that you can grow, grow, grow - so that you can become your full Jackson self. But everyone needs. Everyone has scars that help tell the stories of their lives - I am praying that you become proud of yours, even as I am proud of where they come from, proud of your mighty self here at 20 weeks, proud of you.Listen to me, my beloved first son: you have been befriended by the Almighty God. God is walking into every room, every waiting area, every surgery, every MRI or ultrasound or counseling appointment or wellness check, ahead of the three of us in the wild journey of becoming the family that we could not be without you. God is walking out ahead of us, and whenever we look around at the waves or the walls or the unknown-ness of it, when we cry out or you cry out, I want you to hear me: Jesus immediately calls back to us, "Take heart, it is I! Do not be afraid." Do not be afraid of needing help in the beginning. Do not be afraid of what could happen. Do not be afraid, he whispers to me as I look at your ultrasounds on the fridge -  do not be afraid of the many statistics that cannot add up to the story of your one impossibly precious life.So, Jackson, you whose name means God has been gracious, and whose middle name, David, means beloved, friend. At this the end of our twentieth week together, I put my hand over you and feel you push back at me, defiant already, sure of your own becoming, and we are making our hearts ready for you. We are making our hearts ready for the bigger wonder of who you are - the wonder of taking care of you, of learning your favorite things, of your discovery of the world.We can't wait for you to be here with us, Jackson. We can't wait to hold you and kiss all these places that bear the marks of being human, of being alive. I can't wait to meet you. Every piece of you.All my love,mom

go free, prisoner

I find myself looking at Jesus out the window of the borrowed Highlander in the midst of Waco.He is there clearly in my mind, maybe car windows can be like the iconostasis some days, that piercing window into heaven, that stirring up of your spirit to meet the Spirit.It's just a few days before Pentecost.I have been in the midst of telling Jesus that I am trapped in my mind, lost in the sea of obligations. I have been telling Jesus with the bold and arrogant assumption more often made by the accustomed Christian that Jesus is mild-mannered and so tolerating this rant, and that eventually the emotions will subside and I'll go on, and Jesus will go on, both of us mostly unchanged.Let me tell you something: that is not Jesus.Instead I hear the thought ripple - no, that's too gentle - rip into my mind, hurricane wind, not just a little bit of fire in the voice. I am telling you, go free, prisoner. I don't know what you're talking about, Jesus, the easiest lie, the lie of pretended incomprehension, because a God that we say is so beyond our knowing surely cannot be speaking so clearly to us, to me, as I stare out the car window hoping against hope that I can find my way around the words.I am telling you, go free, prisoner. It takes nothing less than the Spirit to shake us out of our assumed ignorance back into the obvious truths, the who we are before and afters. Because I am so much of the time a prisoner rattling the iron walls when the door behind me is swinging open and it is Jesus who stands there, arms open, waiting. I am the too busy noticing my own struggles to see that the shackles are at my feet, that the sun through the window is the first day of the week and I'm living in the time of the resurrection.I do this with the story of how eating became harder, or how I don't know how to stand up for myself, or how I am too people pleasing or too quick to worry or how I don't know when to allow myself to feel grace because I worry that if I give myself room to not be perfect I'll collapse altogether. I rattle the walls of the prison of I should be better or I should do more or I am not good enough at and then there is Jesus, calling for me - go free. Me, in that car, driving through Waco, and there is Jesus, caring so much more than I imagine he does. Not mild-mannered, not indifferent, not unconcerned. No, I meet Jesus who says, Go free, prisoner, and who keeps calling out to me, who is relentless in the message that my heart is no longer bound anymore, but freed. That there is no need to rattle the walls because the door is opened, because life is beginning.Just a few days before Pentecost I hear again the old story, the Gospel of the radical concerned grace of God - that God will not be mild-mannered or indifferent with us, but come to us, driving through Waco or when we are in front leading worship or as we glance back at the iconostasis, and Jesus will keep saying, go free, prisoner. I have loved you, I have freed you, you are urgent and important to me, you belong to me. Oh, how the Gospel needs preaching again and again to this tired heart.And oh, how good God is, to still come shout it over me.Love,hilary

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

it is about being seen

I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this. I repeat it over and over to myself, sinking into the scratchy wool chair in the downstairs lobby. I'm here because my parents tell me I need to talk to someone, need to walk through the perfectionism, need to admit the things I don't want to admit - I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this. I look around - the water in its bulky upside down Poland Springs dispenser, the packets of Swiss Miss, the old copies of Martha Stewart Living or Bon Appetit, which I flip through foolishly (I barely cook anything) as I wait. Pumpkin sage ravioli. Pumpkin chocolate cookies. Something with cinnamon that sounds beautiful and impossible. I toss the magazines aside and move my feet around the edges of my chair.I don't need this - isn't this for those who really struggle, not for 19 year olds with perfectionist tendencies and maybe some insecurities but nothing major, nothing she can't get a handle on if she would only try harder and shape up and be better?I don't need this - it was just one or two comments to my parents about feeling not good enough or that I was a bad friend and a failure.I don't need this - I'm Hilary. Hilary is put together. Hilary doesn't need to go to counseling.She comes downstairs to get me for the appointment and I walk quietly behind her.Her couch is softer than the chair downstairs, and the office is quiet, and there are paper cups for the hot tea I know she must offer or make for most of the people who come through in a day, in a week. I see the rain on the glass panes of the window behind her chair, and though I am afraid, though I worry, though I think in my head still, I don't need this - something in her smiles tells me it is okay to keep talking.She asks me questions no one has asked before - asks me to tell her all about what I think to myself as I walk through a day, asks me to tell her about school, and how I perform, asks me to tell her about my stray thoughts and my someday dreams and what it is I think will happen if... And I find myself back, week after week, spreading the questions like puzzle pieces between us. I talk about how things make me feel. I talk about what I wish I was, and don't believe I am. I talk about my desire to be prettier, or thinner, about my perceptions of the world, about friendship, about trust. I talk about boys, long, winding conversations where I can't tell beginning from end, the heartbreak from the hard conversation from the new possibility. We take our time.--Nearly three years later, we sit in leather chairs. Her office has moved to a different building on campus, and it's only a brief meeting - we're both in between so many things. But I have to tell her - not in the words, I'm engaged! - but in the smile, in how I tuck my hair behind my ear and how I smile (I smile differently now, softer, I think, but also bursting with life), tell her that she has made a difference. A big one.It was as simple as being seen those years ago on her couch. It was as simple as her kind smile amid the puzzle pieces and the grace that pours out when we see one another. And as I untangled all the knots of not needing it, I realized - I did.I needed to be seen. And she saw me - saw me wild and free and imperfect and so desperate to share myself with the world and so afraid to do anything. Three years later, and we are both near tears, and I tell her the words I should have said a long time ago:This was one of the things I remember most from college. You were one of the most important people I met here. And you, seeing me? It meant everything.Can I ask us again, wherever we find ourselves? Can we see each other again? Can we pause, and look for each other, look past the Oh, I'm fine, and the schedule and the college exams and the minivans. Because it means everything.Love,hilary

i run again

The woods turn golden this year, a fierceness in their leaves. The wind has changed its rhythm along the familiar path. I set out over the stream, across the roots of the ancient trees, weathering the season with them.I often wish I was more than I am.I pound down the first path around the smaller pond. It is always muddied by couples trying to find the gravity to keep them  together in a midnight walk or the cross-country team training for the weekend. I pass no one in the afternoon, and my feet are angry against the earth. I feel them praying resistance to God even though I pray out loud for a heart that can hear, a listening heart. Our whole bodies pray, don't they. Mine prays at war, angry and confused, patient and devoted. It is an out of rhythm prayer. The sweat clings to the back of my neck and I dart among the corners of the path, chasing myself, or God, or running from both.I often wish I was more than I am. The old lie, that there is an other we might be, better than what was first made and called good, cuts the air from my lungs. The path widens and I hear behind me another runner and his dog. The dog bounds up beside me - a beautiful lab, her fur the color of wheat in summer, deep-set eyes and a lightness to her running. She touches my leg with her wet nose. I look down, smile, but ignore her as I run ahead. The dog hangs back, but only for a moment, and then she races forward to tag me again, a bark to get my attention. We go on in the game, running ahead only to be caught. We stop together at the opening to the pond, where the wind is, and the dog dashes into the water and begins to play."She likes to run with the head of the pack," the runner explains as he catches up to us. I smile slightly. "She's beautiful," I say. Another moment, watching her chase down a shimmer of sunlight, and I keep running. I wonder about the dog playing tag with me on such an ordinary day.We  often choose to wish we were more than we are."Thank you, for the dog," I hesitate - could God be pleased with that? Was that even prayer, to be thankful for a dog while out running in the woods alone?There was a poem that a friend gave me, about geese that turn into light. About how we were not leaving, but arriving. About an indescribable wedge of freedom in the heart. You know this poem, I pray - David Whyte, The Journey, a poem that changes you,  clings to you like the leaves piled high in the silent woods."Sometimes everythinghas to beinscribed acrossthe heavensso you can findthe one linealready writteninside you."The one line, the one about freedom, the one about the golden fall and the leaves that cling like fire to the trees, the one that captures, just for a moment, the certainty of the presence of God?"Thank you," I whisper, over and over, tears falling, as I turn left up the steep hill to go home. "Thank you, for the dog."I wish for nothing but to draw nearer.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

dear hilary: keep a vigil

Dear Hilary,How do you love your friends when something happens - something hard or scary or sad or all of the above? How do you say something when everything is unsayable? When you're thrown for a loop, when someone moves and the other stays, when someone is changing and it all seems to go so fast you can't get your mind to wrap around it, and it feels like everything is on the brink of being lost? How do you love them when you don't even know yourself what it is you should say, or all the words dry up like sawdust in your mouth the second you think to speak them?Love,A worried friendDear A worried friend,A friend loves at all times. That's Proverbs. I heard it first on a promotional video at a conference full of women older than me, women with children and husbands and dreams I sometimes had trouble understanding, we were in such different places. I heard it, the words lilting out over a full audience while I held a seven month old girl as she whimpered for her mother, who was the one speaking those words, her South African accent adding a dip and pull to the syllables. I stored it up, those words in her voice in that crowded hotel ballroom, stored it up for a moment like yours, when the telephone lines of friendship get tangled and we fear, desperately, that we have lost a connection.A friend loves at all times.You have to keep a vigil now. It is a deep and difficult practice, one that will test your ability to forgive and be the forgiven. You have to walk the long road in the middle of the night, the daily work of loving in the midst of change, the daily work of accepting that perhaps you do not understand but you love, and understanding is not needed before we love, it is a gift we receive in the midst of love.You have to keep a vigil, because when we are fragile creatures of bones and skin and heart muscle beating out of time with itself and when we live in a world where everything that we thought we knew we did not know, and all that we assumed we could never face until we were grown up we face today. Keep a vigil over this friend, from whatever distance or proximity, from whatever time of day or night.The same night I heard that message I remember not sleeping. It might have been the pullout couch mattress in the hotel room, or it just might have been my heart, sore and tired from asking those hungry and impatient questions. I crept out of bed, and into the tiny hotel bathroom, and stared at myself in the mirror. My face was pale, my freckles like tiny stars sprinkled over the bridge of my nose. I was so tired, and I wanted to sleep, and I stood with the cold bathroom tile against my feet and then I lay down on the floor, curled into a ball, and cried and cried and cried. I stopped only to worry that I was waking the woman sleeping peaceful in her bed next to me. I stopped to listen for the baby, and her steady breathing. But oh, how I cried that night, that hotel bathroom in Hershey, Pennsylvania keeping watch over me and the people I was holding onto and the people who, I knew, I must set free.That was a vigil.It's sometimes like that.Be unafraid to keep it messy. Be unafraid to have days when you don't want to watch, when you run and your hands brush your face and you wonder why you have been called to this. Be unafraid of how your heart is fragile and is breaking, always breaking, because in breaking it is freed again and again for that refrain, which I know you can hear echoing - a friend loves at all times. Keep a vigil over it. And look out over the night - can you see us all, our thousand tiny flames lit beside you? You are not alone.Love,hilary

when there are everlasting meals (guest post)

You guys remember Preston, right? We wrote letters last year, and between the time zones, the words, the Skype, and the way of things, something kind of amazing has happened. Is happening.I'm not going to say much more, right now, because I blush furiously when I try to talk about this person, and I get tongue tied, and my heart decides to practice for a marathon, and I can't stop smiling. You kind of get the picture.But today, I wrote something over at his space and well, I'd love for you to read it? You can click here.When your father is crying on the morning drive to school and whispers that Granddad died in his sleep the night before, you don’t eat the whole day.You don’t eat anything in seat 48H on Virgin Atlantic, except the chocolate pudding, and you have two helpings of that, and return to your books. You read the words over and over but they’re swimming in front of your eyes, and the turbulence outside is nothing to what’s raging in your heart.Keep reading, over here?Love,hilaryP.S. In case you didn't know, Preston is pretty amazing. I still can't quite believe the story of us. But here I go, blushing. But he is. Amazing. And I am a really lucky girl.

this is where I learn something

A day is not a long time. 24 hours, minutes ticked by in neat regular fashion, so many of them already dressed in the colors of what we must do - emails that need writing, conferences that need planning, phone calls and food and sleep and sweating to Zumba routines in your brother's bedroom so you don't break the 200 year old floorboards of your upstairs hideaway. Not every minute is extraordinary. But sometimes a stretch of unextraordinary ones, sleek and swift, upend you.I am driving back to Berlin to fly home. I start thinking about my blog. The rows of trees along the autobahn are neater than the ones at home; the fields are bright yellow with an unidentified crop. The cars blur past our windows, a sky still swollen with rain that hasn't started falling. I've been in another country; it feels like going home is to travel somewhere unfamiliar again.I'm thinking some unpretty thoughts about my blog along the German highway. I'm defensive against this nagging worry about me and writing, and something someone who really matters said to me before I left, "Are you their Holy Spirit?" And he was right - that's the question to stop me short.But the defensive thoughts have lingered across the ocean and some days of separation from the online world, my lungs full of self-righteous air, so justified in what I think I do when I write about perfectionism and being "enough" and grace.And in the way of it, as it always is when you travel, you catch the eye of the land spread out before you and something looks back at you. Maybe it is just the gentleness of the horses in their pasture, but the one who makes eye contact with me has a fierceness about her that makes me momentarily afraid. She isyoung, stamping her foot impatiently at the green earth, and she tosses her mane just as we flyby. We stare at each other a while after.God tells me often that I ought not to imagine myself so wise and knowing. But I'm 22, and I assume that I can learn it on my own and teach it twice before my time.  I place my words around me like fenceposts and bricks, laying my comfort and security in them, but the true things I say, o dear foolish heart of mine?God gives them because I need saving.Maybe the mare who looked at me could see that I confuse the two, the why I write and the who I want to be and the real way of grace.Maybe she shook her mane at me because of that.Or maybe God has been speaking to me about this for weeks and it was only her look that stopped me in my brick piling fence laying defensiveness. God has been speaking.I don't have wisdom about being a perfectionist. I write about it, here and here and all over my heart, but I don't have it. What I bring is just this: that God sometimes lets us write out what we do not really know in order for us to learn it. What I bring is me, bricks and fence posts abandoned as I walk curious toward the truth that God saves me, and the most surprising thing is that is forever a one-way street. We set tables, that person with the right questions tells me.And we bring our words not as bricks but as bread, here for the breaking open and sharing, here because we are all hungry.Back on the road in Berlin, I am now thinking about the mare in the field. About the sleek and swift moments that upend us. About how traveling, however long and far, brings us home again.Love,hilary

dear hilary: pull up a chair

Dear Hilary,I'm not a loud person. I don't write op-eds or shout my thoughts during class. I don't feel like I fit - I'm afraid to say something because, I might be wrong. But I admire people who give their opinion. Who have thoughts and opinions on things like infant baptism and an ideology that lines up with Hegel or Gadamer or St. Thomas Aquinas. But I don't have something neat and I'm not confident my opinions are right. Where is there a table for me?Sincerely,Too QuietDear Quiet,When I lived on Capitol Hill I went to a Baptist church on Sunday mornings. It was a ten minute walk, easy to get to, and every Sunday they served free lunch to the starving intern and college student populations that flock to the city in search of a place at a table. They would pile lasagnas or pieces of chicken or ham sandwiches, and once I think I saw pizzas, their white boxes stacked unevenly in the serving window. At those lunches there was a table of excited students - some from my program, some from schools in the city, a few post-college interns - always talking and laughing, gesticulating wildly with whatever was on their fork. I would creep down the hall towards the room after standing too long by myself in the "book sale" section of the church next to books about the loneliness of single life and searching in vain for the remarkably good looking man who had once talked to me as we both walked out of the metro at Union Station.But I never sat at the table. I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a piece of celery once, standing in the back, and I think my roommate once insisted that we at least eat some bread and spaghetti. I still hovered anywhere but that table of smiling, confident people talking loudly about their view of resurrection and grace and the "political game." I assumed that their table was for the people who knew where they stood and who they were. Who had it sorted out. Who had opinions. Who didn't stand too long next to books on singleness waiting for the mystery man from the metro.I wish I had asked your question out loud, by sitting down next to one of them.The thing about tables is that they're these places of invitation and acceptance, a give and take between each person there, across the plastic blue tablecloth or the fine linen, three chairs apart or bumping elbows. The table in the Baptist church might not have seen or recognized me - but I don't think I made myself all that visible. It felt at the time that I wasn't qualified, wasn't a part of the crowd, but I think the harder, quieter truth is that I wasn't really listening for their invitation. And I didn't trust that there was something I was going to offer simply by my presence, elbow against elbow, passing the extra napkins or the brownies or the salt.Where is there a table for you? You are needed and welcomed in surprising places.You can't be everywhere, sweet pea, and perhaps you cannot have dinner at every table you encounter. But you can, when you come across people who make you think, who you admire, who cherish good words and ideas - you can pull up a chair.It will not always work. I'm scared to give you this advice because there are moments when the grace runs dry and the harshness runs wild, and you aren't invited to draw nearer. I'm sorry in advance for those moments.But I am on the side of trusting that you bringing yourself, even without your loud and confident opinions is something wondrous. I am on the side of thinking it is worth it to pull up the chair, to believe you have something to bring with you, because you are.I am on the side of believing that tables are the beginnings of the truly beautiful between people.There is a table, many, in fact, for you in this world. Somewhere, there is a beautiful waiting to begin.Love,hilary

in the church parking lot

"They don't tell you that being brave also means hurt." God and I are back in my car on a Sunday morning. It's before anything has happened in the day, but I'm dreading going in. "I don't want to talk to you. Just so you know."We sit in silence, and I imagine He is waiting next to me. He isn't impatient but we both know the clock moves its way forward and that soon, I have to hold sticky hands and smile."I don't want to talk to you," I begin again, but God is a bit too gentle this morning for me to keep my posture. "How could you do this to me? After all of it? How could you ask me to give that up? How could you ask so much of me all the time? It's too hard. I can't. And I know you say you're Alpha and Omega, that in you my heart is safe and all of that. But where have you taken me?"God frightens me out of talking. The silence in the car is so absolute I might have stopped breathing. My heartbeat has quieted to a dim metronome. The cars on the highway don't notice, but I wonder if the trees in front of me have softened their blossoming, just for a moment, to eavesdrop."I told you it would be costly, Hilary Joan." That voice. Always, that voice.I turn in my seat, knock my glasses off and begin to wail."But where are we? Where am I?"As if knowing that God and I have gone up to a mountaintop to look out over my life wasn't clear enough, he offers me the metaphor. I type this and the silence deafen."Hilary?"I keep typing, deciding that I will make this blog post about being brave and how it hurts, that I will make it about what I am doing, learning, how I have grown the wings and can fly now. I turn the radio on, and the sun creeps through the windows."Hilary."I pause in my typing, close my eyes."Remain in my love."I keep my eyes closed. The light tickles my eyelids and the birds have taken up a chorus about the coming morning.But nothing more comes. The voice is gone.remain in my love.I sit still.Love,hilary

why love must be wild

I named this blog almost a year ago - the wild love.I imagined that we would, that I would, live that way. I remember finding the name as I sat at work on a Friday afternoon, in the middle of the ending, with only a few weeks left before everything changed. I remember trying it out, running the syllables over my tongue like water. The wild love. It sounded right.When I was born, my dad named me. I've heard the story told a thousand ways, and there is something precious and funny about it. My name, Hilary, means cheerful. My middle name, Joan, comes from John, and it means, God is gracious.When you ask my dad how he came up with this name, he'll tell you that Hilary just seemed right. He'd always loved the name - but it was decided almost like a lightning strike: this was what I was going to be called, and that was it. Joan is for a dear friend of my parents, and because, I think at the time, Hilary Joan sounded just right to them.Hilary Joan. Cheerful, God is gracious.If ever names might help us imagine who we are meant to become...And now, my blog is just shy of a year old, taking its baby steps into the world. There have been a few posts that have made their mark on me, perhaps on you, dear readers. There has been a lot of pondering. There was been a lot of asking God in the midst of this, the hard of 22, how and why things are as they are. There has been hunger, and fulfillment, a confirmation, a wedding. There has been the loud voice of the Holy Spirit across the waters and my own timid replies.But here I am, with this, the space that I have named, and I wanted to ask again - why must love be wild? Because we are a people too desperate to love only inside the conventional, accepted boundaries. We are a people too hungry, too alive, too beautiful, too broken.Love is wild because we are wild. Because we are made in the image of Someone Wild, Someone who sang out for freedom, who defied logic, who broke his Body and poured out his Blood and saved us once and every day.Love is wild because there is a bird sitting inside our ribcage, like Emily Dickinson said, the thing with feathers perched in us, and the only way to hear it sing is to start singing.I'm only just about a year into this blog and I named it something before I could have known how deeply I would want to become the very thing I had named.I want to live with a wild love: a wild love for words, for readers, for strangers who I pass on the sidewalk and dear friends who stay up late on Sunday nights just to make sure I'm okay. I want to live with a wild love that hopes and forgives and says that "no" is sometimes a beautiful word and that "wait" is sometimes a promise and that "why?" is sometimes the answer itself.I'm Hilary Joan - a name with meaning that still feels a little too big for me. And the blog still feels like that some days. But I want to link hands with you across these words, across these miles and time zones and ages, and love wild.Love,hilary

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 

dear lizzy bennet (on grace)

Dear Lizzy Bennet, dear fictional character I have spent much time and energy loving and fretting over,When I read about you, most of the time, I judge you.I know, that's silly and strange, to admit to you right up front that I am judgmental towards you. You are a character with such a story, with so much of what I dream of and imagine myself to be. You and I love books and being outside, are too headstrong sometimes and we think with our hearts and our first impressions for far too long. For a good long while, the things you did I scrutinized with my pen and my imagination and my hope all mixed up. I wrote about you. I wrote against you. I wanted you not to be so stupid about Wickham and to see Mr. Darcy for what he is right away. I wanted you to be fiery but gentler, to appreciate Jane, to see what was in store for Lydia and do something about it.And I don't have much by way of good explanation, Lizzy Bennet, other than to tell you that most of it was because I was judging me. For my stupidity over Wickham. For my foolishness. For my inability to see Jane well. For being fiery at all the wrong times. I saw in your story so much of me, and I poured out this judgment on you as a way to explain to myself what it was I thought I was supposed to do, and be. I thought if I analyzed your character enough, understood what was wrong and right with each action, each sentence, then I would be safe from making the same mistakes. I would have mastered, through the reading of a story, all the mysteries of life.When I finally say it - that I thought I could master life through the pages of a book - it makes me laugh.Life is only understood as far as it is accepted. Life is only revealed to us as we live it. Knowing that I am like you doesn't stop me from making the same mistakes and different ones, from missing Mr. Darcy and falling for Mr. Wickham. It doesn't keep me loving Jane better. It doesn't mean I protect Lydia. It doesn't even mean I am a better balance of fiery and gracious, tender and firm.Actually, it turns out, Lizzy, I only begin to understand your story when I have entered my own. I only begin to see how we are truly alike, you, the character I have cherished alongside the women I imagine you'd befriend - Anne and Jo and Marianne - and I.Maybe that was what I was missing in high school, when I read how you behaved and thought I could learn completely from the pages of a book. Maybe that's what is missing every time I fall deeply into a story, leaving my bedroom for the wandering moors of Somerset and for New York and Green Gables and even Gilead, Iowa. That these stories are at their best, echoes of corners of the fuller life. They hint at the life we are already in.That's why we love them so much and treasure them and keep them on bookshelves for years and years on a special shelf we've marked "the words you must know to know me" in our minds.So, I just wanted to tell you, Lizzy, that I have a new kind of grace for you. For falling for Wickham and being too headstrong about Darcy and not appreciating Jane or protecting Lydia or loving your parents or for goodness' sake doing something besides mooning around England (why weren't you writing a book?). I have a grace for you because as I lean into this story, of 22 and just-after-college I recognize how understandable it is that you do what you do. I get it. I love you a little more for it. Perhaps this is a beginning of grace for myself.Love,hilary

to be saved

I am afraid of the dark after Tenebrae. I walk into the sanctuary after the sun has gone down, and I hear the shuffle of programs and the squirm of young children (was it so long ago I was one of them), as we wait for the new fire of Eastertide.The priests faces are masked in shadows. The fire leaps ahead, but it is not yet comfort, only a raw hope. I shrug off my coat and lean forward, trying to hear and see that this hope will soon be ablaze in our pews and in our hands, a live light among a hundred candles. But first, the priest must trace the sign of our victory and death's defeat, make the sign of the cross in the Paschal candle itself, so that it might be a sign to us. He must pray, dipping into the new fire for the light that will now never be extinguished:May the light of Christ, gloriously rising, dispel the darkness of heart and mind. I hear these words echo - and the shadows begin to flee. Even at these words, there is more light. The choir has lit its candles from the Paschal Candle, the acolytes - the light-bearers - are bringing into each pew a new flame that dispels the darkness. I can see people I know across the aisle; I can see my old headmaster and his wife standing near the organ. I can see and hear, feel and almost touch, the entrance of the light.When I receive my own small flame it burns so bright I can no longer be afraid. For the shadows are fleeing, even in the still-dark of our waiting, even in the not-yet of our expectation. The shadows that quickened and hid the Christ candle on Wednesday are already scattering, undone by the new light that is so gloriously rising. We are saved through nothing but the blood, Jesus said to me on Friday as I stared at the cross shrouded in black. Nothing but my blood, nothing but being entered into it and washed in it, nothing but this radical and frightening story, where I go to be offered up for you, and you see me offered up, you see and taste in the smallest of ways the grief that God pierced into Mary's heart. Nothing but you, Hil, and me, and my blood poured out. Nothing but the quickened shadows that make you afraid and my light hidden in the tomb. Nothing but your distracted mind, crying in your car over the things I have been teaching you, how hard it is to receive grace, how hard to be a receiver, and not a giver, of love.Nothing but my blood.That's what it means to be saved.And so, on the Holy Night, when I am spent with crying over my selfishness, over all everything I failed at during Lent, over the stupid blog posts and the mean words, over the ungracious dismissals and even less gracious longing?This is what it means to be saved: to hear prayer loud in the ever-lightening sanctuary: Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him, and all the ages to him be glory and power through every age forever. Amen. Nothing but his blood will save me. But Christ is the Morning Star who knows no setting. In Him we light this candle. In Him we sing the first, breathless alleluia.I stand amid the shouts of Easter praising, silent, black dress and pink cardigan smudged with all my trying and striving and failing, my feet tired in their polished shoes, hands uplifted.To be saved through His blood. To be saved through the ever-burning Light. There are no more shadows this night.I can hear Him draw near to touch my face, in the strange silence between shouting church-people and bright lights in the sanctuary and though He is not touching my face, He is. Lord? I whisper. I close my eyes and feel Him smile. You have saved me. Love,hilary

dear hilary: this is called delight

Dear Hilary,So I'm reading the chapter "Artists, Mystics, and Clowns" in Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust and wondering: why do we act the way that we do, and how does this reflect God? What's so great about efficiency? Gravitas? Breast-beating? Sobriety? Somewhere along the line I leaned that these were more holy than extravagance, art, and levity. Somewhere alone the line I learned I must stifle effulgent passions, had no time for interruptions, mustn't laugh when there's so much suffering in the world and so much work to be done, must put away childish playfulness. Somewhere along the line I learned that God is begrudging and exasperated. What is God's disposition, anyways?Sincerely,Can't-Lighten-Up Dear Can't-Lighten-Up,In my high school, French was the only foreign language offered. We learned it playing "Tour du Monde" with vocabulary, drawing pictures of "fromage" and "papillon" for each other on the chalkboards in the House, wandering the streets of Angers and Paris and Aix ordering our first café au lait and pain au chocolat in giddy tones. I remember vividly one day after we had gotten out of class, I walked around the corner with my friend and we ducked our heads inside a patisserie, and we ordered in a rush two "religeuses." The woman behind the counter didn't look at my ratty hair in its pigtail braids and my very American purple winter coat (a hand-me-down from my sister, I think) and make a noise that meant, "American." She simply smiled and put the pastry in a small bag with a piece of tissue paper. "Bonne soirée" she called out after us. And I felt the rush of what the French call "joie" - joy.I was a junior the year that we sang Gabriel Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine." We used to rehearse the song in its delicate French in a crowded room with uneven and overly polished floorboards. I sat in a grey folding chair, tucked my feet under me, pushed that still-ratty hair behind my ears with my fingernails coated with blue sparkle. The song hushes in its final line to this - "Et de tes dons qu'il retourne comblé." And may our praises return filled with Your gifts. It isn't the exact translation - I'm not even sure I could translate it well, if I'm honest - but the last, hushed line, has the word, "comblé" which, whether or not I understood the line right, is a French word for "overjoyed." The verb "combler" is about filling, being filled.I tell you these stories because you are asking something about who God is, and what His attitude is about us. And I learned this from singing "Cantique de Jean Racine," from the woman in the patisserie by the Lycée David d'Angers, from my years of unkempt hair and hand-me-down winter coats: God is delighted.Delighted, overjoyed - we so often mistake those words for happy, or, more honestly, for naively cheerful or optimistic. We think that if we name those adjectives, we're making it sound like we (or God or both) aren't taking hurt seriously. That we have missed suffering. That we have lost sight of the ache of the world and are applying a pink band-aid to the gaping wounds.But it is the work of delight and joy to come close to suffering, even closer than the so-called serious realism. It is through joy, not cynicism, that we approach the unspeakably difficult.Because joy and delight are not happy feelings: they are the choices to let love win. They are the choice to trust love triumphant. Joy is a choice to believe God when He calls what He has made very good, and a choice to draw near to that very good world in its ache and terror and sadness.If you do not practice laughter, you cannot know this joy. If you do not practice the playfulness, the levity, the extravagant gestures without reason, the shrieks of hide-and-seek games, you cannot walk with us to the places where love is most needed and most difficult.God is overjoyed with us. God is delighted. Because He is these things, because He is delighted in my moment in the patisserie, eating something truly good and laughing with my friend, and wishing the woman kneading bread a "bonne soirée" - He can enact such an extravagant and mysterious story of love triumphant. Because God is delighted, because His delight is not some blithe or silly perpetual good mood, but the serious weight of everlasting love, He is able to save us.This is the story we are going to tell the world. The story of love triumphant over darkness. The story of joy and reuniting, of harmony and whole, of laughter and extravagance. But to tell it, and to tell it in the places most needed, we must practice those things in ourselves.So, dear one, this is the work of delight. It will take everything you've got, to live the blurred lines between sorrow and weeping and joy and splitting your sides laughing. It will take your whole self and a self transformed to banish the categories we've so carefully constructed around what counts as "serious" and what counts as "light," to sing while we cry and rage while we laugh.But I think it can be done. I think it must be done. So that, in the mystery of love triumphant, we can sing:Répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante;Que tout l'enfer fuie au son de ta voix;Pour on us the fire of your powerful grace, O Lord,That all hell flees at the sound of Your voice.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