i number the minutes

I number minutes like stars. The minutes Jack is in my arms. The minutes he sleeps, oxygen levels resting in the high 90s, that even 100. The minutes between where we sleep and where he is, the minutes of hallway, elevator, distance.And the minutes of prayer.Last night we stood over the giraffe warmer, which my baby doesn't need, feisty and strong as he is, keeping his own temperature, and my eyes fell on the icon Preston brought from our living room - the good shepherd, the lamb on his shoulders. It sits and looks over the edge of where Jack sleeps, and out past him, to the hum and beep of the other beds, the other little ones.Months ago, at the first phone call, at the very beginning, when we didn't know anything but the need for a follow-up ultrasound, the need for a consultation, the need to see a more specialized doctor... I stood at that icon weeping and cradling my belly and asking Jesus again and again where He was. I wept and asked and I told Jesus, again and again, that He could do something, that where there was skin or muscle missing He could build it. Wasn't it His voice at the beginning, singing the world into being? Wasn't it His voice the wind and waves obeyed?Wasn't Jesus the one who spat on tongues and spread mud on eyes and put his fingers in ears and declared, by the words of his mouth, be opened?And wasn't it Jesus, reaching down into death, calling back Lazarus, the widow's son, Jairus's daughter?Last night I looked again - my son has a mark from his IV in his hand that looks just like the mark in Jesus' hands in the icon. The hands that are holding the lamb on his shoulders. The hands that, even in these long minutes, I believe - I must believe - are holding my son.I cannot number all the stars or all the minutes.. But then I remember:To whom then will you compare me,    that I should be like him? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see:    who created these?He who brings out their host by number,    calling them all by name,by the greatness of his might,    and because he is strong in power    not one is missing.And I remember, again:The Lord builds up Jerusalem;    he gathers the outcasts of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted,    and binds up their wounds.He determines the number of the stars;    he gives to all of them their names.Great is our Lord, and abundant in power;    his understanding is beyond measure.The Lord can count the stars.  He can name them all. Who am I, then, to think that Jesus has not been mindful of these minutes? Who am I, then, to think Jesus has not counted each one with me, His knowledge of them far more perfect than anything I could fathom?Jesus has seen each minute of prayer, of worry, of resting, of oxygen and of desperate joy when Jack is in my arms and I feel the weight of him, his hand grabbing my shirt, and Jesus is numbering the minutes with us.Isaiah 40, Psalm 147 - God numbering the stars is hidden among the promise that God comforts His people, that God should be praised for His care of His people. Hidden among the bigger promise is the piece I can cling to: Jesus knows each star, each minute. Jesus holds us, counting each breath.Last night, I held Jack and swayed my first sway of motherhood, singing his father's favorite:This is my Father's worldI rest me in the thoughtof rocks and trees of skies and seasHis hand the wonders wrought. Number the stars, Lord Jesus, number the minutes. I believe I have only begun to see Your nearness and Your love. I believe I have only begun to see the wonders Your hands have wrought, and can, and will.Come, Lord Jesus, number the minutes with me.Love,jack's mom, and your hilary

when i am listening to coldplay

Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones.  This song is in my top five of all time.If I made you a playlist, sometimes, I wonder what story it would tell of me. I made one, right now, thinking about it, but I don't know what the story is.A story of trying.A story of waiting.A story of belonging, of leaving, thinking myself the one left behind sometimes.But more a story of always being found.--I have a story about this song that I can't quite remember, me standing in the back of a crowded gym after I had graduated from the school I love near my hometown. The a capella group in the school sang it, harmonies built with raw voices, and no one was afraid, and no one's voice trembled. I think it was the time that I was so sure things would not come back together, after a year of the try hard and try even harder life...And then they sang,lights will guide you home. I don't know how to explain this, exactly, but in the quiet tumult of these last weeks and months, I have been listening to it again.lights with guide you home. That's how I want my son's journey into the world to be - lit up, illuminated, glowing with the fierceness of love.That's how I want all of us, the wild and ragged band of us, to journey through the world. I want us to live illuminated.That try-hard life, it feels far from me now. It isn't - I've asked so often for something to do, for an explanation of how I didn't try hard enough, for a list of the should-have-dones, my voice cracks with over-asking. And some days I am heavy with the lie that we earn the life we have, that it is ours to possess, ours to control.The truth is that Jackson belongs to me, but I don't possess him. Jackson's story, Preston's story, my family's stories, they belong in mine, and mine in theirs, but the stories aren't ours, not our creation or our prop or our possession. The world shifts under you when there is a person arriving, a new life, a new wonder... and it all changes again, and you're cradling your belly in front of the bank teller and you realize that you are not the same. That you don't want the life that is hard won or earned - you want the life that is too full to be your doing.You crave the life too full, too good, to graced with God's intimacy, to have been your plan.--I remember that self in the high school gym, her with her try-hard tears and the weight of a world she doesn't quite know yet on her shoulders, heaving them forward. I want to tell her that it will be okay, that she will learn in about two hundred and twenty weeks that she will not want the hard-won trying life anymore. I want to tell her that instead, she should let the words sink into her bones, nestle there. I want to promise that her life will be lit by the fierceness of love.That her husband will love her so much better than the boy who didn't see her.That her son will kick her at the most extraordinarily right times, reminders of his abundant life even in the midst of what shadows, what feels dark.That God will move, and keep moving, calling out from ahead and behind and next to her - Take heart! It is I - do not be afraid. That she will have, not a planned life, not a hard-tried and hard-earned and hard-won life. She will have a life softened and lit by love.--Lights will guide you home,and ignite your bonesThis time, I sing it softer. A lullaby. A reminder. A single, glimmering hope.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the edge of your hope

Dear Hilary,I am a recent college graduate, unemployed for five months, living in my parents’ house and watching as my hopes for graduate school disappear as the letters come back. I’ve lived through several tragedies in the past several years -- murder, abuse, relationships broken up. I feel as if I am suspended in motion, watching my friends get married, have kids and buy houses – and I wish they had what they have. How do I have hope in the Lord when I am continually disappointed with what happens in my life? Is it wrong to want to be happy?Sincerely,Afraid to hopeDear Afraid to hope,Every time I read your letter, I start to think. I think about you, writing away at your computer somewhere. I think about the way you crafted your story, your question, and what you might have been doing while you wrote it. I think about how courageous you are to write it down at all, because writing makes things a different kind of real. I think about whether you'd drink a latte or something without caffeine in it, if we went out to coffee together.And your question? There is no pithy quote on this wide and wildly beautiful world that would capture an answer to it. Because you want to know about a living thing - hope - and living things are never as simple as those handpainted lettered signs on the Pinterest page. You want to know about a thing that moves with us, that spills over into the most surprising corners, that feels at once impossible and utterly, undeniably, real.After I read your question the first few times, I did yoga. I am not great at yoga, so I picked the "easy yoga for beginners" (because that can't be that hard, right?) on amazon and I started. The first thing we did was lie down. I almost turned the video off and muttered something dismissive about the idea that lying down is a kind of exercise, but for some reason I stayed. I closed my eyes, the way the all-too-peaceful instructor told me to. I willed myself to be calm. That hardly ever works for me, because my heart starts racing and I think of my to-do lists and then before I know it I'm already missing half the warrior pose. But that too peaceful instructor, she said something that made its way into the maze of my racing heart and mind. She asked, "Where is your body right now? Honor what your body is telling you. Honor what your body can do today."I think there is this part of us all that secretly believes everything important happens in our heads. The disappointments and the hurts and the joys and the wondering, that's all work internal, in that life of the mind, in that wild wandering heart space. And we think that space is, must be, infinite, able to do whatever we tell it to. We think we can think our way or feel our way or demand our way into hope or faith or love. We think we can order the heart space around, tell it to expand, tell it to get wiser - tell it to memorize Pinterest quotes - tell it to have hope in the Lord.And that's where I think we go wrong.We are just one: body and heart and mind all tangled together. We can no more say to our minds or hearts that we can be more hopeful or less disappointed than we can tell our bodies to sink deeper into Warrior II or arch our backs higher in Cobra. "Honor what your body can do today."You have to start testing the edges of your hope. You have to get real with God and with yourself and ask, "Where are you today, body and heart and mind? Where are we with this lived thing, hope?" And sink a little deeper, and honor where you are today. Explore it. Ask God all the things you think you can't ask because you think if you ask you won't get closer to hope. I mean the gritty questions: I mean the "Why is this happening to me?" and the "Wasn't I faithful to you?" and the often-lurking-for-me-anyway "Do you love me? How can you love me when this is what I see?"Afraid to hope, I am here to tell you hope is hard won, body and spirit jumbled together. It is a tested thing, it is a thing that lives. And this is the greatest gift to us. Because it means that when we honor where we are today, we inch towards more strength tomorrow. When we honor the conversation we are really having with God today, we move towards a new conversation tomorrow.It isn't wrong to want to be happy, by the way, but I don't think what you're after here is an answer to that. I think you're after the bigger thing - the hope, the hope that is beyond the optimism we associate with happiness, or with achieving the things we want. You want the bigger thing, the hope. I love that about your letter. I love that you ask such a big question. How courageous you are.So now, I will ask you to be courageous again: go forward, body, mind, heart as one, and test the edges of your hope. Bang down the door to God, be loud, ask yourself where you are today. Sink a little deeper into the stretch of hope, the stretch of this wild thing that is you and God. Tomorrow, I promise you, hope grows.Love,hilary

dear hilary: what lives on

Dear Hilary,Have you ever been unkind to your body, or yourself?Love,judgmentalDear judgmental,I never thought I'd write anything about this story on this blog. To be honest, I never wanted to tell anyone. For a while in college, not all that long ago, I waged a silent, prim, polite war against my body.I stood at a cabinet looking at a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread and dared myself to walk away, to be braver and better than food, to not need the comfort that comes with being full, feeling full.I dared myself to go for days like that, to run every morning (that was the permission to eat, you know, if I had run). I dared myself, sly and quiet, to master desire.I think all this was around the time that I realized I wasn't ready to go to graduate school, and that I didn't know what to do with my life after, right around the night I wore a brown sweater dress and scrawled an inscription in a book of poetry I gave him for his birthday, scrawled something about how Edward Hirsch writes beauty into the world, and so should he, but I wrote it while we drove back from a conversation that changed us forever, with the light on in the car along the back roads, an ending kind of conversation.I think all this had begun a long time before that, too.I'm scared to write it here, to admit out loud that there are these days when there is still a voice in my head that tells me I would better thinner. I'm scared to tell you that the girl you look at, with her smile widening at the sight of you, with all the good she has been given, she still has a bit of glass edging its way out of her heart, too.I'm hopelessly tangled in my own story, which has wild love and this silent war so knit together they're both mine. They're both me.But I titled this what lives on. Because something always does.What lives on in me is the hope, that the patient repetition of the words, "I am beautiful," in the mirror, in the driveway, in the desperate too-long runs in the woods, they were healing words. I had to speak my way into believing them. I still have to do that. But I have hope.What lives on in me, almost two years later, is the time I sat in the parking lot with my mother who is wiser than all the rest, and let her love me back, back from this polite war against fullness, back from the rage at the lack of control we have over our days, back over my fight with my present. What lives on in me is the radical notion that there is something good alive in me, something I have made, or am making, of this time when I was unkind to my body, my self.Because what lives on is what we breathe into being, what we keep, what we cherish.So dear heart, because you will breathe life into something, let it be hopeful. Let it be beautiful, let it not be bittered by all that it was in its ache but let it be beautified by what it became, as your story always holds more than you imagine it does.I whisper to you that the things most beautiful are often first, and somehow, continuing, most broken. Wild love and a polite war. Talent and jealousy, wisdom and pride, a thousand peacekeeping and another thousand battling moments, all inside us.To me, what lives on is how wondrous we are, to contain such things - and how much more wondrous, that we can make beauty from it.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the thinnest envelope

Dear Hilary,I've been telling people for a good while now that I have plans for graduate school. You see, I've always had plans for graduate school. Once it was law school and once it was nursing and a few times it's been a joint JD/PhD and always it's been the idea that I should and can be a part of that. But lately, when I tell people, I tell them the school, the fellowship, the hope, and then I start to worry. Because what if I don't get in? What if I get that thin envelope in the mailbox? What if I'm not one of the few who get chosen to be a part of the class of... ? What will they all think? What will I do?Love,NervousDear Nervous,What will you do? I'll just ask the question back at you. It isn't for anyone else to work out or reason how you build a life after that gnawing possibility of rejection. We can give you the pep talks, pass the B&J, or the g&t, or both, tell you to stop worrying and stop feeling that prick of fear, because you have a beautiful life... but this one belongs to you and there isn't all that much I can tell you. You, however. You can tell you a lot.You can tell yourself that the meaning of the thinnest envelope is less than the meaning of the love you've sincerely built in the afternoons and the extra hours and the holding your palms open for another heart. You can tell yourself that if graduate school A or B  says no, it means less about who you are than the six pairs of eyes that gaze up at you during the busiest time at the prayer circle, mean less than the three year old who thanks God for you, right there in her list of horses and birthday parties.You can approach the mirror with an open hand and whisper that you are going to hold it open and watch what is put inside it, without peering sideways at what is put in the palms of the other hands that grace your life. You can imagine yourself a seed, in a fallow field, hungry for the rain, but unafraid.You can whisper a bit of peace, say Sarah Bessey's, "calm your heart" while you drive home. You can remember that not one of us came into the world stamped with a seal of graduate school approval and all of us came in with God's image borne deep in our bones and His law written on our hearts and He is right there, engraving His name over the walls of our hearts.You can pour the second glass of red wine. You can write yourself a letter and put it in the thinnest envelope and mail it to yourself for the same day that those other envelopes, thick or thin, arrive next year. You can write love inside that letter: love for the work that has belonged to you, love for the work that is mysterious and yet to come, love for the people, love for the places, always more love than you were able to bear but you somehow did, anyway.That's all you.What people think if you don't get in is a deep fear that lurks under the bed. Will they love me, if I'm not a ? we whisper. If I never have a - if I fail to win - if I don't - ? And this is what will catch us slowly, the sinking feeling that perhaps what they love is only how well we've performed.You work your way out by rereading the old and good and true words. You run back to the promises that we have been set free, and He who loves, He is from everlasting. His command to abide in his love. His promise to send His Spirit to be with us.You are loved abundantly, dear one. Not because of an envelope or a graduate school or an anything. Love is just like that: overwhelming and rich and somehow, always, seeking us. Let it find you.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