my small span of ardent life (guest post at christie purifoy's)

Today I have the huge privilege of sharing a bit of my writing at Christie Purifoy's blog. Christie has been a favorite writer of mine since I discovered her writing a few years ago, and I'm honored to share this post - talking about wisdom, the architecture of our hearts, becoming who we are... I hope you hop on over! 

When I was in high school I was once described by a new friend as doing a kind of “butterflying” – from person to person, subject to subject, leaving conversations half-finished or always to be continued. I had, in the thoughtlessness of a fifteen year-old experiencing peer acceptance, jumped from lunches to free periods and neglected her. I hadn’t realized that she moved more carefully, finishing each thing before taking up the next one. I apologized profusely, and we went on to build a friendship in chemistry classes and after school theater. But I vowed to myself that I would change, I would abandon my butterfly ways. I would be slow, I told myself. I would be wise.Have you ever kept a promise too well? Have you ever been so good at becoming more like someone else that you left yourself behind?Keep reading over at Christie's - and if you want to read a bit more of my writing, you can learn more about my first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith over here and even order a copy from your favorite retailer!Love,hilary

dear jackson: on daring, and prayer

Dear Jackson,When you were small, in what feels like a different country, hidden behind hills of time, when you lived in the country called the NICU, I used to number the minutes. I used to count your breaths, the dip and climb of your oxygen. I used to pray each time you inhaled that the breath would come back out and that you would take another one. I prayed single words as you breathed - keep. breathing. one. more. breath. It was not that you were in imminent danger, exactly - the doctors told us daily that you were stable, that you were safe - but having once witnessed what it was for you to cry out for oxygen, I could never shake the need to count each rise and fall of your chest.Today I realized I have stopped counting.Now I watch the rise and fall of your chest with a confidence that comes, not from the little tube we slip in your neck each week, not from the nurse who watches over you in the long nights, but from you.It comes from how you run from your room to the record player, how you bring us the puffs when you want more, how you love to be chased down the hallways. It comes from how you laugh when you see us, hair sticking up wildly in all directions, when you wake up from naps. It comes from how you press against me in this phase of being afraid of strangers and then how you push away from me back into the world. You are daring, you are adventurous, because you feel safe.And so I stopped counting your breaths.I tell you this as a way of telling you something about prayer. I prayed once by counting. And now that I have stopped, that I have dared to believe you'll breathe without being watched, I find myself at a loss for how to pray. It was easy when there was panic, to keep me focused, to keep the demand right in front of God. Is this trust, I wonder as I watch you attempt to crawl up onto the couch? Is it resignation?We are in a new country, God and I, unfamiliar and brighter. I have to squint my eyes to make out the horizons of where I think I might be going. In the old country of the NICU, the only way I could talk at all was to yell and to count. Now I have stopped counting and stopped yelling - what is left? How will I begin to say something again?  So I pray to you, Lord Jesus Christ, together with the Father who is without beginning and Your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages Amen.I once memorized the feel of these syllables in my mouth, in the anxious wanderings of my freshly 18 year old heart, my knees knocking as I stood in the unfamiliar familiar, Greek and English twisting up and out, past icons and candles, the singing. Every Amen is a comma in the Eastern Church, a pause in the endlessness of worship. I would walk in, often a few minutes late from idling in the car afraid to walk in alone, worship having already begun. I would leave clutching the blessed bread from the priest's warm hands, a piece of the liturgy to go into the world with me. Every Amen a comma, a pause.Back then I thought it proved something to pray conspicuously. I would go into the small windowless study room on my floor, a few doors down from my room, holding a small white spiral bound book of Orthodox prayers - all but announcing my piety to the tangle of women walking the hallway or simply finding the time to take a shower, do their homework, sink their roots into college. I would fumble through the prayers at noon, holding a knotted bracelet to count repetitions of the Jesus prayer. I would make confession, ask forgiveness, pray in a more righteous voice as time went on. I hid my heart in the glorious prayers of other people - surely, God would be more impressed with me if I prayed in ancient words instead of my own.But I want to tell you, Jack, you whose spirit is full of daring, full of courage, full of light - prayer for me now is laughter. Prayer is silence, prayer is half-formed thoughts I say in between tickling your stomach. Prayer is singing "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" night after night and feeling your head sink onto my shoulder as you remember where we are all going - out into that Jordan River, out towards home.Do not be afraid if someday you reach for words - your own, the Church's - and you find your hands come back to you empty. Do not be afraid if you come out of one type of prayer and walk the road for a long while without knowing what to say next.Every Amen is a comma, a pause, and courage is sometimes pausing long enough to feel God's friendship in the weight of your son on your shoulder. That is prayer enough. God hears.Love,mom

dear jackson: about your dad's second book

Dear Jacks,You are finally asleep. You have taken to resisting it unless someone is holding you, rocking you, standing up... you have a pretty specific list. I love how much you already seem to know about what makes you happy: our faces, your bright red fox toy, your yellow and purple rattle. You light up this world, you light up the rooms where you are. You've caught the hearts of your nurses and your doctors, and that smile - oh Jack, that smile - we will do almost anything to see that smile, to catch it for just another second.Last night your dad gave you a bath. You smiled and smiled and smiled at him. You already know a lot about your dad. He is the one who sings to you with the record player, the one who catches you up in his arms, keeps you safe, rolls you over and over, tummy to back and back again, helping you be strong. He is so good at that work, helping us be strong.I want to tell you about your dad's book - Out of the House of Bread. In the chaos of your arrival the months slipped by. I meant to write this when he finished it, as soon as we knew about you last year. I meant to write this all summer, while we were waiting to meet you. I meant to write this all fall, and time rushed past, slow and too fast all at once.Your dad wrote a book that kept me, that keeps me, tethered to a life of prayer. It is a book about bread. It is a book about talking to God. But Jacks, this is the thing. It is a book where Dad lays out gently, moment by moment, practice by practice, ways for people to connect to Jesus. It comes out next week, right before you are four months old.You must have heard him pray, all those long months while you were growing inside me? He would close his eyes and place his hand over you, and you would kick him back with your fierce assertions that you were listening, that you were there. He would pray with the Psalmist, pray with Scripture, pray with wonder. He would help me pray the examen. He would pray, day in and day out. He still prays this way.Your dad wrote a book about prayer. I bought you a copy. I know someday, when you have questions (because we all have questions) about this living conversation with God, about the work of prayer, this is the book I will want to have ready to give you.The kitchen is a place of great prayer in this house, Jacks. When you have questions about the work of prayer, I will tell you to go into the kitchen. I will tell you that there, sitting with your dad, I learned to pray.Chances are good Dad will be in there, his hands full of spices or dough, his eyes alight. Chances are good that the kitchen will be a place where you go to talk with God. Chances are good that God will meet you, again and again, along the hallways and among the smells and tastes in this home.When you ask me what to do, what to pray, I will offer you this book. I will offer you this kitchen, so well loved by your dad. I will tell you that this is where God meets us.Your dad will teach us so much about prayer. Much of it will be lived, something we can't write down. Some of it he wrote down, in this book, and we can read it again and again and practice it together, the three of us and everyone God sends to join us on the way.I wanted to tell you this, Jacks - your dad is a man of prayer. I can't wait for you to ask me those questions. I can't wait to give you this book.Love,mom

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

until every good gift is given

The shower is just a little too hot. I'm weak-kneed still from the work of bringing Jack into the world. I steady myself against the walls. I feel each minute pass. I feel the weight of the water, the easy way that I breathe. How I long for Jackson to know how easy it is to breathe. How I long for that miracle of breath, that gift, to have been given differently. How grateful I am, in the tangled way of things, that it is a gift God will not rest until He has given it.Jesus and I have never before had so much and so little to say. I keep entering the throne room, watching and waiting, and I can't see anything. And the throne room becomes the ocean and I am unsteady on my feet. My boat is gone, the night is thick and starless. And the ocean becomes the desert and I am the Israelites wandering their 40 years, every sky an impossible hope for manna. And the desert becomes the ark, and there is the steadiness of that water from the shower - the rain that falls, keeps falling.The throne room is the ocean.How many weeks did we walk on water, Jesus? How many hours did I lean late into the night, walk the space of Jackson's room, the kitchen, the living room, praying the prayers I had never known to be possible? How many nights did You come towards me, those words repeated? Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid. How long did we kneel together, Lord, the three of us somehow dwelling together in this feeble self of mine, in this feeble house? And it is here in the midst of the ocean that You declared Yourself King over the lights, the lives.The throne room is the ocean, and the ocean is the desert.The NICU measures the world in three hour increments. The lights do not tell time, and minute by minute, feeding by feeding, we watch the joy of our hearts grow, become more himself, reveal his personality: strong arms, strong legs. He sleeps like me, hands curled up by his face. I wonder every morning in the shower whether we might yet get a phone call, a miracle reported, whether we might walk in to discover everything changed. Morning by morning, no report comes back. I wake up each day desperate for manna. Jack grows, we rejoice. How many sets of three hours have I lived?The throne room is the ocean, and the ocean is the desert, and the desert is the ark.We have lived days and nights of rain, the seas swelling far higher than our small boat. We have lived inside the smallest perimeter - hallway and bed and bits of highway in between. We have lived, and are still living. We sent out a dove - we wait in the ark for the promise of dry land, the olive branch.The throne room the ocean the desert the ark. They are one. They are the places of God's unthinkable nearness. They are the places of encounter. They are the places where I walk out with my son, with our family now made more whole than we knew it could be, day by day, minute by minute. Your living is your prayer, my mother tells me. You are alive, you are still living. This is the prayer of the throne room, the ocean, the desert, the ark. God is unthinkably close. The world is difficult, beautiful, and new.He will not rest until every good gift has been given.Love,hilary

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

I am a long way out on the water

"I hope your baby has both his eyes."She tells me this when she can't find the card she made for Jackson. When she comes out for goodnight hugs to the group of women gathered to shower me and this little one with love, she hugs my belly separately from me. I hold onto the card, put it next to my bed. Her mom tells me that she and her brothers and sister have been praying for Jackson, for miraculous healing. I'm not sure there are more powerful prayers in the whole Kingdom than those of these children, who know Jesus with a closeness most of us have forgotten.We are bringing her card to the hospital with us, and I have been praying daily that we might get to show her that God has answered her prayers.--My son's elbows and knees (or feet, or something else) press close to the edge of my skin, and I remember that we are close to his birth. There are only a few weeks left. I have quieted down, my body moving deliberately, slowly. We have come a long way from the first positive test in January. We have journeyed far. And as I have slowed down, I hear something surprising. I hear Jesus ask me to be bolder. Pray, Hilary Joan. Come and kneel with me and pray. --When we first found out about Jackson's cleft, we drove in a stunned kind of silence to the new hospital. We sat in the new, terrifyingly quiet octagon room where we would have ultrasound after ultrasound, blood pressure, weight, the daze of normal and not. We waited, we listened, we drove home. I thought my heart would strangle me in its longing to escape from the car, from the little person nestled so safely, so joyfully inside me, from the news, from the everything-it-now-must-inevitably-be.At 29 weeks, we had an MRI. Jackson was, as he always is, on the move. The results of the MRI showed that the right ear hadn't formed completely. "This is new for us," my doctor said. "But they can repair it surgically. The internal structures are there, so there is a good chance he can hear eventually through that ear." I wrote down words on the back of a credit card envelope. I hung up the phone, and again, my heart and its desperate desire to escape my body, escape the ever-dwindling weeks, the soon-to-be birth. There were only 11 weeks left then. No time for a miracle. No time for Jesus.--'I hope your baby has his eyes." 3 weeks from our due date I meet this little girl, who has a boldness I'm not sure I have ever had. I meet this girl, who prays for something I claimed to be too hard, too late, too impossible. 3 weeks from our due date, I hold a card that prays for what I have been hedging around. I hold the prayer that I have been afraid to admit that I am praying.--The Jesus Storybook Bible includes the story of Jairus's daughter. Listen to these beautiful words:"'We don't have time!' Jesus' friends said. But Jesus always had time. He reached out his hands and gently lifted her head. He looked into her eyes and smiled. 'You believed,' he said, wiping a tear from her eye, 'and now you are well.' Just then, Jairus' servant rushed up to Jairus. 'It's too late,' he said breathlessly. 'Your daughter is dead.' Jesus turned to Jairus. 'It's not too late,' Jesus said. 'Trust me.'"--I know what the MRI says. I know the ultrasounds. I know the plans and the teams and the big words. I know the impossibility that it must seem to be.But week after week, Jesus has shown up. Take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid. Week after week, I have been invited to pray with the One who formed my son Jackson. Week after week, I have been invited to ask for something that is hard to believe. Week after week, I have lost my footing in that once-sturdy boat.Week after week, I have learned it is safer on the water with Jesus than in the boat with only my anxious, strangled heart and the crowd that murmurs - it is too late. Jesus stands there: It is not too late. Trust me. --"At Jairus' house, everyone was crying. But Jesus said, 'I'm going to wake her up.' Everyone laughed at him because they knew she was dead. Jesus walked into the little girl's bedroom. And there, lying in the corner, in the shadows, was the still little figure. Jesus sat on the bed and took her pale hand.'Honey,' he said, 'it's time to get up.' And he reached down into death and gently brought the little girl back to life."--Jesus tells me to get out of the boat and get on the water. So here it is:I am praying that God completely, miraculously, heals my son Jackson. I am abandoning the reasonable. I am abandoning the words - "well, whatever God wills," or "if not, then we'll do X" because those are the words that I use to stay in the boat while Jesus waits for me on the open water. I am abandoning the careful attempts to make you think that I am still "realistic" about our circumstances, to reassure a mysterious crowd that I am still seeing things as they are.I am abandoning the familiar strangling anxiety of the boat, the familiar unbelief.Hilary Joan, pray. Come kneel with me and pray. It's not too late. Trust me. --I don't know how Jesus is speaking to you about prayer. I don't presume to know. But if I can ask, if you would, come out here with me on the water for a little bit? Whether it is about Jackson or about something in your life, will you come out here, where the reasonable drowns in the presence of grace, where what is expected  falls at the feet of the one who promised it was not too late for Jairus's daughter? Here, in the middle of the water, there is none but us and Jesus. And we are safer here, in the arms of the one who saves us, in the hope of the one who heals us, in the mercy of the one who loves us.Will you come out here with me on the water? Will you come and pray with me?Jesus is here. It's not too late, Hilary Joan. Trust me. Love,hilary

this can carry us

I learned to pray when I learned to drive. Those smooth, familiar backroads, at age 17 too hasty in hoping to be older. At the stoplights where even now I do not notice how I know where I am going, I just turn, left, then right, then right again. I learned to pray driving past the old white house covered with vines and lilacs that only bloom for a week, a glorious hidden week in May, the kind that sneaks up upon you and shatters your resignation with joy. I prayed the unconventional hours: early morning requests and questions, the late evening thanksgivings. Often, I repeated this: I love you, Jesus. When I slink into the driver's seat, even now when I go home to visit, I feel the pull of those hours, the richness hidden in rhythm and repetition: I love you, Jesus. I remember the drives, keeping those hours, the expectation, the simplicity. The lilacs bursting forth against the old white house.These hours keep me praying in the long summer of expecting my first son. These hours keep me, my younger self's prayers, ones about God's glory being revealed to me, or the fullness of God's wisdom being shown to me, or the love of Jesus, my younger love of Jesus. These hours keep me, praying somehow still over me from the week of bursting lilacs to the week of driving to Temple, of learning about Jackson, of new glories.I have wanted to write about praying for Jackson, but the truth is, it's really the old prayer I'm praying, that the Spirit is praying in me and for me: I love you, Jesus. I find you so beautiful. My son knows my voice. This overwhelms me, since so much of the day I am quiet. We talk in snatches, I tell him about what I've been reading, I tell him about his cousins, his grandparents, how much love is waiting for him. I tell him about his doctors, too. I tell him that he will love them, that they are helpers, people God gave special gifts to for helping kids heal and grow and be strong. I am telling myself all these things.He hears about this ordinary life all day, carried around inside me with his fierce, strong spirit: he hears Preston read One Hundred Years of Solitude, me proclaiming my craving for red velvet cake and ice cream sandwiches, my laughter with his dad, our plans for crepe myrtle trees and a backyard garden and a library of books just for him. And he hears me on the couch or the bathroom floor, some mornings getting dressed, how those are sometimes hard moments in my expectation. How I cry sometimes because I am new at this, new at even the very act of becoming a mom, becoming his mom.So the old prayer, the lifeline - I love you, Jesus.He hears that, too.May this be the forever thread running through our days together: I love you, Jesus. I love you with the first light slinking through the blinds, with long hours of reading, with appointments and ultrasounds and so many pictures of Jackson as you are forming him. I love you when I pray laughing or weeping, or both at the same time. I love you with the bursting lilacs all those years ago, the first hours set down, that resound now. I love you with everything in me that is unfinished - with the poem that that line comes from, Robert Bly, I think.I love you, Jesus. This is the well-worn prayer. This can carry us.Love,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

i pray you have a wilder imagination

Dear tiny person, 17 weeks alive now,You will start hearing my voice soon - the sound of my heartbeat, loud and steady, the movement and rhythm of my body in the midst of all the ordinary work of these spring days. And you'll hear Dad's voice, the voices of the people around us, the noises of this life you're coming into.I have been hearing a lot of questions about you. People ask me, "but how will you still be a student?" and "will you quit school?" and "aren't you going to need more time off?" and when I say no, they look at me surprised, a little concerned, a little knowing. They let the silence hang between us, the wide-eyed looks that carry the message across the inches of dusty floor - surely, surely, you didn't think all this was possible. haven't you underestimated how hard it will be? I am praying that you never hear these questions from me.I am praying that when your dad and I hold you, we tell you the stories, again and again, that we are a people who never underestimate anything but the power of the Lord Jesus to walk into our lives and unfold the most surprising, most marvelous, most extraordinary things.Your life is the gift that your dad and I never imagined we would be so privileged to see so soon. Your life is the greatest gift God has given us.I pray that I do not ask you questions that say your imagination is too unrealistic. That you can't possibly think you can do this and that at the same time, that you are underestimating how hard it will be, how much work it will be, how likely it is to fall apart.I pray that you will hear me say instead that our imaginations should be wider, and wilder. I pray you will hear what I know in my bones, that we too often live limited lives because we limit our imaginations. We think that motherhood and philosophy graduate seminars can't possibly both be successful; we think that you must choose between art and biology; we think that you cannot travel AND or be married AND or work this challenging job AND or ...and we teach this to each other, with our well-meaning questions and our expectant looks, with our heartfelt, "but how will that work?" Our imaginations grow small in the shadow of what we think more realistic.I pray that your imagination is wilder than that. I pray that you hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, who will call you to get out of the boat, to leave behind what you know, to go into towns and cities, to leave the empty tomb with just the wild hope and these words: "I have seen the Lord!"I pray you know that this is enough reason to rejoice in even what seems difficult or strange in the eyes of the world. It might not satisfy other people. And right now when I put my hand over the place where I know you're growing, and I tell those who ask me these questions that I am not afraid to be a student and a mother, to be a wife and a philosopher and to hold you in the long nights and read to you about epistemology and the Rainbow Fish -when I do this, it probably doesn't satisfy the person who asked me.But if it does not - if the question still lingers, how can she think all this is possible, then I dare them all to take that question and place it before the Lord Jesus. I believe Jesus will widen their imagination. I believe that Jesus will remind them of the stories:Abraham, who left everything he knew to follow God,Moses and the people of Israel, who followed God into the water of the Red Sea and walked safely,Ruth, who left everything she knew to go with Naomi,Hannah, who did not leave God alone in praying for her son,Mary, who gave birth to God Himself in Jesus,Peter, who got out of the boat, and even when he doubted, cried out and Jesus saved him immediately,of the people Jesus healed, and ate with, whose faith, whose wild imagination carried them into the very heart of God.And I believe that you, and me, and Dad, we are one story numbered among the thousands that Jesus tells about those who love Him. They are all stories of wilder imagination. They are stories of people who love, and this love, it casts out their fears, their idea of limits, their idea of what will be too hard and too much and so hard to imagine how it will all work. And so, beautiful, breathtaking tiny human being listening to my heartbeat, I pray that you are filled up all these many years with a wild imagination. I pray that you feel these stories around you, in your bones. I pray that you know most of all that God loves you, wildly, beyond your imagining - and when God calls out to you, you need never fear - it is His love, calling you to Himself.Love,mom

when I am learning to worry heaven (on prayer)

We have been worrying heaven on your behalf!

She says this laughing from the pulpit, voice bright with the joy of a Sunday morning, and the congregation shouts sings nods claps its approval, its affirmation. We have been worrying heaven on your behalf. We have been up at night and during the day, in the midst of our praising and our praying, telling heaven about you, reminding heaven about you, worrying heaven for you.How long has it been since I worried heaven for another person?How long since I got on my knees, face to the floor, or prayed loud in the car or on a run, how long since I was bold enough to declare that my words spoken in the name of Jesus have power? That when I'm talking to the Almighty, I believe that the Almighty is listening, is hearing, is attending to me?Have we forgotten what it means to pray? Have I forgotten in my desire to make sure I'm contemplating the right issue or the right person or the right non-self-centered words, have I forgotten that Jesus gave me power to worry heaven for another human person?I think about the faithful who wouldn't let God alone, the widow who pursues the judge, the men who carry their brother to Jesus and lower him through the roof, the disciples who panic and cry out on the water, the crowds who clamor for loaves and fishes, the Israelites who wander and persist and insist with God that God has cut a covenant and God must keep it.Why am I so timid when it comes to praying? I don't want to sound like I want something too much or like I wouldn't be happy if God gave me something else? I don't want to be a bother, I don't want to overstay my welcome in the family?But this is what the word of God says in the stillness of my heart when I stop long enough: you cannot overstay your welcome in this family. --We have been worrying heaven on your behalf!The courage it takes, to come bold before the throne, to come as our fullest selves, selves that persist and insist and come back again and again with the same prayers: safety for this person and life for this one, hope and patience and a new job and the truth to come out and a smoother transition and the thing that they really need.I want to pray like that again.I want to make my home in the tangled knot of the family of God, where we cannot overstay our welcome, where we cannot pray too much. I want to worry heaven for the ones I love.--I've been trying to write this blog post for weeks, and I couldn't find the words. I've been sitting at the computer, waiting, and the words haven't arrived. But the other morning, while Preston made coffee and I put off getting out of bed for as long as possible, I heard it: why are you waiting for the right words? The Spirit will teach you to pray. Perhaps I waited so long to write this blog post because I was hoping I could write it about how great this new way of praying is, and how much I have become good at it. And, of course, God hears that too.I don't know how to worry heaven or how to pray with a wild, relentless confidence. But the Spirit will teach me, will teach us.So, courage or not, confidence or not, today I am on my knees, learning to worry heaven. And falling deeper in love with Jesus, who teaches me how.Love,hilary

God is speaking joy

"And I think to myself, how long has God been speaking this joy over my life, and I have been too filled up with anxiety to hear it?"I tell this to her on the phone pacing outside the building where I spend most of my time as a new graduate student. I try to let my feet carry me where they will on the winding paths of campus, past library and other classroom buildings and people on skateboards and scooters, past trendy backpacks and BPA free water bottles.I am relaying a conversation I had with Preston about callings, about anxiety about the future, about what is happening in our lives and what it will mean and how it will happen, and it's in the midst of telling her about the conversation (not even the conversation itself) that I realize it:God has been speaking joy over my life.Anxiety is an unruly substance - it fills up the spaces wherever you let it in. It creeps into the corner of yourself and becomes the drumbeat and gives the marching orders.And I fill myself up with anxiety so much that I cannot hear God speaking. And it is in the very act of resisting anxiety that we will find, that we can hope to find, the ears to hear.Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. Habbakuk, 1.5.When was the last time I was astonished at the Lord? When was the last time I was astounded? When was it that I stopped and marveled and felt my knees go weak from seeing the wonder and the blessedness?When I resist anxiety, even for a moment, I can catch a glimmer of the song God is singing over my life: joy.In resisting the anxiety there is promise, there is purpose, and no, it's not a new life plan with a bigger God stamp on it. It's purpose that is drawing nearer to the Father and purpose that is becoming more like Jesus and it is purpose that will lead you to a new city in a new state in a new marriage so that you might know God better and love him more. The places where we live out our vocation have a tendency to substitute their purposes for the ultimate purpose: we think that we're here to become a certain kind of scholar or a certain kind of teacher or a certain kind of electrical engineer, and that's the real reason God said go. But in that we forget: we forget that Jesus first and always and finally calls us to be a certain kind of human being, one who is made glorious by the Spirit dwelling and moving inside them, one who bears God's image, resplendent, made new, gracious and graceful and alive.Before Preston and I got married, I memorized Romans 8. I don't know why, except for the ways that, daily, I have had to remind myself of it. Remind myself that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Remind myself that you are in the Spirit. Remind myself that those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified. And here again, I remember: nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. In the midst of what is unknown, we are not apart from the love of God. In the midst of what can make us anxious, we are not apart from the love of Christ Jesus. In the midst of hoping and praying and waiting and raging, in the emptiness and the fullness, the silence and the singing, we are not apart from such love.Be astonished! Be astounded! For nothing will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. And thus, rejoice.Love,hilary

along the dark and twisty road

Did you know, that there is such a thing as becoming more confused by your obedience?The things I wish someone had told me.Obey, and the road will get darker and twistier. Obey, and the clarity you prized will vanish. Obey, and the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living will become the prayer for water on a desert highway, the simplest, most desperate question - is there manna for me today, Lord? - with no thoughts of hoarding it or storing it up or anything but the one meal, the daily meal, the crumbs from the table meal.Obey, and that sweet daydream you had about what you would be like and sound like and do, the person you glorified in your mind, you in maxi skirts sweeping through your life with such grace and such ease, she is crying on the couch, yet again, making lists, yet again, asking again for a manna she doesn't know how to find on her own.And you think about how to say it because you think there is nothing more embarrassing than admitting it, that you don't have it together on this dark and twisty road.I keep thinking about Jacob.I keep thinking about all the moments when I have likened myself to Jacob, wrestling, strong, prevailing through the night. I keep thinking about all the times that I have said I have wrestled with God and yet my life is being delivered. Or even because I am wrestling so my life is being delivered.It was night when Jacob wrestled. I never noticed that before.Jacob wrestled until the day broke open.Jacob went out into the dark and twisty night, into the utter unknowing, and wrestled until there was light.I will not let you go unless you bless me. I will not let you go.I am saying this in the dark. I am saying this to a God who I grasp for and hold onto, praying that I have, in fact, found God, that the wrestling is a holding fast, that in the midst of the darkness is the closest kind of encounter.The things I keep inscribing on my heart and the sides of my notebooks during class, that this is the place of closest encounter and Jacob, he walked with an ache in his hip because in the ache is the remembering of how we wrestle with God, all of us, and how in that is the closeness, the hope.I'm out here on the dark and twisty road of obedience, and if you're there, too, then can I whisper a hello, I can see you? And together we will wrestle until day breaks open.Love,hilary

draw nearer and i will show you

I want to write, and I can't think of anything, and I think I should tell a story. I think I should return into the past, back to a hill, to a late-night on the street outside the athletic complex, to the long looping drive to Great Neck in Ipswich, which is best at twilight when you have too much on your mind to sound it out. I think writing is this work of building a story out of what has happened, to explain in artful just-long-enough paragraphs the way he looked and she sighed, the way I knew then and there that I would remember that moment and it was a lesson. 

But the great work of remembering is not always good. 

It is tremendous effort to gather the scattered bits of a story from across our mind and resew it, present it back as a whole. This is the beginning - when I walked out the door, and here is the middle, when I was wearing old tennis shoes, and here the end, when I gather the wisdom as the door of my car clicks shut. And then this is the lesson of the story, the point where I see again the gracious goodness of God, where I see freedom beckoning, where I stand up for myself and the story is a triumph story and I retell it again and again remembering. 

Oh, I would like to believe it is always good to remember. 

I would like to live in my memories, recreating again and again the way that it went, exaggerating my innocence, their unfathomability, which I relive, claiming to seek understanding, but really, it's just to comfort and rejustify the parts of it I suspect might yet need to be laid on the altar. I think to myself that if I keep the story closer, if I tell it to enough times, how I learned the wisdom or how I kept the faith... that will be the making of me. 

I have told some stories to myself far too many times. 

I have reveled in the revisit, conjuring up images brighter than the first of the summer blackberries glistening on their spidery branches - what I wore and just what I said, and how it happened next that this one song started playing, and when I hear the song this is what I go back to. 

I'd be happy to keep doing it if Jesus didn't interrupt me almost constantly these days to ask questions. Hilary, he begins, as I start to hum the opening bars of the guitar chords of that song that was playing at the time that... Hilary. 

How does this honor me? 

What a question, Jesus, and I can hear the scoff in my voice as I think the words in my head. Isn't the telling of these stories the point of it all? Look at the wisdom I have. Look at the understanding I have gained. Look, look, look at what I have been through and what it means and how I got through it in this glorious way. 

Yet the question remains. How does this honor me? 

I try to keep assembling the pieces of the stories, to keep my eyes fixed on that one time in high school and then that letter he wrote me at the end of a long summer and then that time she and I argued about whether God existed in a Starbucks when they still had the beautiful purple chair to sink into after a long day. 

The pieces crumple, like ash, like dust. I am trying so hard to remember the stories of how I was wronged and how I have been hurt and how I am so good at overcoming. But when have I told myself the stories of how only through Him am I more than a conqueror? Have I ever written the words on the doorposts of my house, on my forehead, on my heart, written the story that those to come might yet praise? Have I remembered the encounter with God on the drive home more than the two drinks and the heartbreak that came before it? How long, O Lord, have I been making the stories after my own desired image of myself, rehearsing my part pitch-perfect, lingering in the hallways of the past for the rush of the feeling? 

There is nowhere to hide from the question anymore, and as it catches up to me, I am afraid. Without these bits of dust, without these bits of the person I think I was and the way I want to remember myself to have been - what then? 

Jesus only says, Draw nearer to me, and I will show you. 

Love,
hilary

I'm leaning harder

"You've changed." He tells me this as we're getting ready to turn in for the night among the whir of electric toothbrushes and the ripples of the brush through my hair. I turn, still trying to loose stray knots from the red lion's mane around my neck. "Changed?"I know you're thinking that this is an obvious one: marriage changes you. He nods. "Yeah. You're more sure of yourself. You're leaning harder into Jesus, too."We keep talking, our voices circling in the dark, how things are new and different, how my thinking has sharpened on some things, how we've both learned to weigh and sift our words anew, because we live with someone who wears our words like birth marks on their skin. We slowly drift into the silence, the comforting dark of another day that has been put to rest.But I can't fall asleep. I'm still thinking about that, the leaning harder, the change.It's not that marriage changes you that surprises me: it's the weight of the change. It's the way you carry the change in your ribcage and guard it like your bones guard your heart. How you feel it differently, more than just self-awareness or increased confidence or courage, feel it some more physical than that, feel it in those tugging counts of the hairbrush and in the whirring electric toothbrush.I've said for years I don't do change well. That I'm a creature of habits of my own making, that if I want to be spontaneous I want to the only one in control of that spontaneity, the one who decides to change the plan. I've declared foolishly that I'm just not very good at it and thought it would be a sufficient excuse to never have to do it. I thought God would give me a pass on transformation bigger than the ones I say I'm ready for.But the Spirit moves us along in the wiser pace - the pace we wouldn't set for ourselves. So here I am, being changed in big ways, ways that make even the word marriage bigger because it has now begun to mean all that changing, all that becoming between me and my husband and our voices circling in the dark.I'm weak-kneed from the changing. Maybe that's why I lean so much harder. Maybe we lean into Jesus not out of the virtue of feeling like we have the time, or we simply desire it - maybe we lean in desperation. Because the joy of the Lord is our strength, and his joy in my changing in the ways that are perhaps much more than I wanted is the strength in me to do the changing, to submit to the changing.So I lean harder on Jesus because Jesus calls the change forth from me in this marriage, in the little ark of family that my husband and I make every day, and because Jesus is the way to change.But what about that other part? Me being more sure of myself?I'm still awake, my eyes searching the ceiling, my hands over the blanket, tracing a pattern in the quilt. Most of the changes these past weeks make me weak-kneed, remember? So how can that make me sure of myself?In an Orthodox church near my hometown there is an icon of Mary, called in Greek the platytera, which means "wider" or "more spacious."  The icon is of Mary, her womb a golden circle with Christ inside, holding up a hand in blessing. Mary's hands are outstretched, a position of prayer.I think about that icon often, for it puts an image to the meaning of Christian - to be a bearer of Christ. To bear Christ in this world, even as Mary did. Somehow this is not separated from her hands in prayer, the way that she is presenting Christ to the congregation in the icon, even as she presented him while he was on earth and even now as we in turn are sent out each week to put on Christ, to see Christ in one another.Maybe being sure of myself is in this: I am learning what it means to put on Christ, and therein lies my real self, my self that is raised to new life in the power of Jesus. Maybe being sure of myself is not a confidence but a clinging, my own hands and weak knees opened in prayer, my own feeble heart even now becoming more of a home for the living God."I've changed."I whisper the words in the dark as I begin to fall asleep. Perhaps it is its own prayer.Keep me leaning on you, Jesus, where I can be sure of myself.Love,hilary

bring back everything

I wander in the thousand windsthat you are churning,and bring back everything I find.Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 55God.I pray in the cloisters of a thousand older prayers that I have to believe someone before me prayed, that I have to believe are already well worn, broken in shoe prayers.I am wandering in the thousand winds.You've brought me here to the beginnings of everything, and there are a thousand winds, each so full it seems it will take a lifetime for the words to catch it. How can I bring you back what I find?I find my old shoes on new pavement, a Texas sun planting freckles on my shoulders, a bridge over an unhurried river, the smallest breeze lifting my hair off the back of my neck between red lights, almost as if you wanted the ordinary world to come a little closer to me. The air, the sweat of the morning, the silence.How can I bring you what I find? Because he is next to me when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep, and there is suddenly, finally, and all at once, the ark of marriage, as much mystery as calling and covenant and courage. Oh, the courage it is to be married, to wake up next to each other with so much more than ever can be said between you, with so much fullness, and so much wonder? How, God? How can I bring you what I find?You are churning these thousand winds, O Lord, and I am so small. How can I bring you what I find?The question echoes along the corridors of my heart, walks with me into the grocery store, when we walk down the street to talk about our days, or what has surprised us, when it is morning and the words don't seem to be there, for what it is that I want. But this is what I want: to bring back everything I find.To be a gatherer of the scattered pieces of your goodness in the world, the smallest goodnesses of muscles that move me along that unhurried river and the goodness of the man who moves with such ease in the small kitchen, his smile betraying so much more joy, the goodness of the well-fought fight, of the bigness of Texas sky or the way a phone call will pour water on a thirsty heart, of Life of Pi read out loud one morning, of country music through speakers, of running out of words long enough to be asked to listen again.This is what I want, God, to walk these cloistered prayers and to be in the churning winds and to bring you what I find.I find your fullness in these thousand winds.I want to bring back everything.Amen.Love,hilary

where are you speaking

"It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation." - George SteinerDear God,Pause. So, God.Pause, again, take more time, roll the name off your tongue, honeyed and sweet but sharp and knifing its way through the air. God.Pause. This is how I pray. I lose the words as quickly as they come, and for me, the word-smith, the hammerer of syllables, who watches words like owls at dusk, eyeing the next feast, the next shadow spilling over the ground. This is how I pray, stops and pauses, distracted by the name God, by the question of if I pray too much with "He" or "Father" because I'm listening too much to the sound of my own voice than I am to the silence where God speaks and sings. I pause and hear myself, preen my feathers in the righteousness of a bright sadness of Lent, which is a phrase from Alexander Schmemann in a book that I haven't been reading but said I would read this Lent, a fact I haven't told God in the midst of my pleased-self-reflection as I pray.God does not monologue; where did I learn it?In the hazy heat of the summers I stayed home and ran through my sprinklers, forgetting the provisions of the creation? In the midst of the chaos of the weeks that roll through my several synced calendars? Where did I learn the prayers of run-on sentences that begin and end with me and all the words are blurred not like poetry but like the overachieving grasp at something good to say to God breathless and always trying to beat my self at my own sense of piety?God does not monologue. Pause, the phrase on the page, alone, before these italicized words are added.  God.Where are you speaking?Because God does not monologue, I can use the second person, the "you" that in French has taught me formal and informal, friendship and lover and austere other, in those three letters looping through the prayer. Another pause, I've been writing and writing but the truth is I don't know anything more about prayer after writing this, even these very words I crave and love. If God does not monologue, God must want us to talk with him. He must like conversations, even the ones like this, the ones that are me pausing and asking myself if I know how to pray, the ones admitting, God, I don't know how to pray and I'm talking and talking and writing and the words have lost me.Where are you speaking, O God my God?I will claim you in the second person, human being to Creator.Where are you speaking, God?I will talk back to you, this intuition of what you must desire and ask of us, in the depths of the silence that is your speech.And I will fall silent too, to un-learn my monologues.Amen. Love,hilary

next to Jesus

Most of the time I don't walk next to Jesus.I walk sideways the opposite direction, smile frozen in place so if he happened to look over, there I would be, right prayers right charitable giving right causes right theology. And when I think he isn't watching I inch away. You'll find me pressed into a corner of the big family room of the faith, probably with a drink and my idea of a superior opinion in hand, watching nervously to see if anyone is watching me, if I look as good at this as the next one of us as the next one of us as the one over there who actually reads the Bible more than once in a fiery moon in summer. I'm a hideaway in the habits of this faith.--I walk past him in cities: head down, headphones in, insulated against the cold and against the winter and against the possibility that this banner of believer calls you to something more than just Sunday morning. I walked past him once outside a Starbucks in DC and was so sure I had missed Jesus that I went back with coffee and a sandwich and he only took the coffee, we never really spoke, I left the sandwich on the edge of a slab of concrete. I turn up my collar against the wind and wonder what I did, signing up for a lifetime with a lover of souls and a freer of captives, because someone like that takes you to captives, to lost and hungry and bleeding souls, to hospitals and corners and back alleys.--In the Ash Wednesday service the Gospel is about the Pharisee and the tax collector, praying. I'm an acolyte, a torch bearer, and so I'm close to the Gospel when it's read, the words loud and the incense sticky against my face. "God, I thank you that I am not like other men." I tell God in my head at that exact moment that it is a good thing I'm not like the Pharisee - that I don't talk to him like that, that I know the moral of this story.Jesus doesn't say anything but I know he heard me. It's the silence of him as I hear my own prayer said back, still in the words of the Gospel. "that I am not like that tax collector..." That I am not like that Pharisee. Jesus looks back at me in the final words, reads me quiet and certain and the condemnation seeps into my heart and the incense is still clinging to my robes: "Truly I tell you, whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."--Nothing is safe with Jesus, it turns out.You can't keep your life, the habits of your heart, the way you expect the world to read you like a book, to be what you need, to offer itself to you for your easy understanding. You can't keep that superior opinion in the corner of the room and you can't walk past the corner and you can't, oh, how you can't pretend to Jesus that you're doing it right.He who would save his life? What was it? Will lose it. I forget that part.It's too quiet here, now, in the after of Ash Wednesday, we're entering a bright sadness, as the Orthodox would say. It's too quiet so I can hear myself, hear how little of what I think I am and what I think I know I am allowed to keep if I'm going to be someone who loves Jesus.But this Lent, me, the Pharisee with the incense sticking to her robes and the old habits of her life sticking to her heart, I want to walk next to Jesus. I want the bright sadness before the Easter morning. I want Jesus. Whatever I must lose to find him.Love,hilary

advent 2 (maranatha)

I only know the word as an Advent word. I only hear it as a crying out, a prayer, desperate and true -Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus.There is a holy impatience in the word. Perhaps, a holy impatience in Advent altogether. It is the impatience of a people who, though not ready, want to be made ready, a people who cry out prepare the way even as our hearts falter and fumble. Even as we still say the unkind or ungenerous thing (oh, how many of those I have said and thought), even as we still forget to open our homes, even as we treat each other without the care of a people walking in the light, even then -we want Jesus to come.Maranatha. Lord Jesus, I long for you.I used to ache to light the second candle on the Advent wreath. I used to long for nothing but to be old enough to read out to the congregation - "Today we light the second candle of Advent," - I used to bounce around these old walls and floors with the knowledge that we were closer to Christmas. My child self knows how to be impatient for the wonder of Jesus better than I do. And though perhaps the impatience was mingled with a few hopeful glances at my stocking (I have it still, decorated with my name in felt and a bear holding a present), though perhaps I was easily caught in the swirl of the season -even then, I was longing for him.Maranatha, maranatha.Is it so soon that I have forgotten how words are whole prayers? I have sat here this afternoon wondering about whether I can, or should, or even know how to write in this space anymore. I have asked God, didn't I know how to pray here, once?But only the word is sometimes the widest prayer. A clatter of syllables on a thirsty, impatient heart.Maranatha.Come, Lord Jesus.Pray it with me?Love,hilary

unless you bless me

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