myself, fourteen

"Dear Heavenly Father," I start the traditional way, the adjectives in a pleasing order, my list of requests and people at the ready. "I pray for..." I am lying on my side inside a thin sleeping bag in a youth center in Montgomery, Alabama. The boys are in a room next door, giggling to themselves. A block falls off a shelf, and they race into our room screeching that there are cockroaches in the room next door, and we screech back that we are all supposed to be asleep and if the teacher hears you he's going to come in here and be disappointed.

We can't stop laughing, though, under the thin sleeping bags and the humidity, I forget my prayer in an effort to scoot a little closer to the circle of people telling secrets and even though I don't know any secrets, I hover just near enough to listen.

This is the summer where I try to be too cool to pray. I sit in church unenthusiastic, thinking more about how I want to marry the boy two aisles up and how I scrawl his name across journal pages. I pretend that church is just this thing we have to do, my family and I, and really I am just like everyone else and I want all the same things and Sunday morning with Bread and Wine is just like the soccer and lacrosse practices at the field in the town. I wish to myself I was playing soccer and lacrosse on Sunday mornings. 

I have braces stretched across my smile, which makes me self-conscious about smiling, but it doesn't really stop me. In the pictures of this trip, you'll see me in clothes that don't quite fit but I wanted so desperately to seem like I was the kind of girl in the advertisements with the cutoff shorts and the long straight hair and the effortless tan. In the pictures you can see my trying.

Myself, at fourteen - the word is trying. There is a yearning that radiates from my pictures, my smile, my neatly three-hole-punched tests and papers. There is a hopefulness that enough makeup will turn the school dance at Halloween into something fun and me into someone who could be brave enough to dance without looking over her shoulder. I watched the people watching, and I was afraid. Who wants to be the girl who prays when there is music and racing heartbeats? Who wants to be the girl who worries over Sunday morning worship when there is adventure on a Saturday night? 

That June of cockroaches in Montgomery, the night we ate catfish from a local pond and I promised that I would come back to the South  - it feels like a forever ago. 

And then the other day I was her. She reappeared at the corner of my memories and my present, waved as if to remind me that in the summer of fourteen, I believed I could make my faith an add-on to my heart instead of its very blood and oxygen and beat. Because I wanted to curl up in the sleeping bag on the very inside of the circle and have the secrets and go to soccer practice instead of church. Maybe it had something to do with the harder things of daily life in faith, maybe it was just a day I didn't really want to kneel, pencil skirt to office rug, over the work week. Maybe it was just a yearning without another reason. 

I recognized her in me the other day, the girl who wanted to be too cool to pray that June and that whole summer. And I waved her nearer, so that perhaps in the mystery of knowing ourselves I could reassure her, though she is a past self, that it will be better to be on our knees for the world. It will be better to yearn after the Word made Flesh who comes to dwell inside and among us. It will be better, in the end, not to have been too cool for any of it. 

Only on our knees can we hear our heartbeat. 

Love,
hilary

when you tell your abs you love them

"You're good to me, abs." I pant around the corner of the lane, 4 miles from home. The sun doesn't seem to move across the sky at all, and I run in and out of the shadows of the trees lining the sidewalk. They're gnarled and old, full of stories, branches climbed by eager children. They've shed thousands of leaves in the few seasons I have been alive, and there is a steadiness to them I wish I had. Perhaps they have their own small jealousies, seedlings wishing they could become trees faster, a maple that wants nothing more than to be a cherry tree or a redwood. Perhaps oak trees are jealous of the cool white birches, and some days all trees want to burst into the fiery flames of tiger lilies. But in the midst of the quiet afternoon, I somehow doubt that these steady limbs and leaves long to be something else.But I do. In miles one and two I told my body it should be smaller, easier to carry around, more like a gazelle than a zebra. When I hit mile three, I got quiet for a little bit, but the voice in my head said that all of it would be easier if I just ate less and ran more, that I could solve all the disappointment on this earth if I wasn't a disappointment (that they wouldn't leave if I was something else). And the good girl in me, the one who believes in grace for the rest but not for her, felt the sun on her sweaty neck and said, "if you were more beautiful, Hilary, you'd know more, love more, be more graceful, less impatient... if only you were all those things. You'd even run faster."In these moments I usually resign myself, agree with the voice. After all, she talks so matter-of-factly, so practically. She tells me that I could just stretch my arms a bit father and I would be there, I would make it, I could become all those many things I wish I was. She gives me what I hear as good advice.But on this Sabbath day, I hear my voice creep out of my mouth, right out into the street where those long limbs cast their shadows, where I can hear pool filters running and the squeals of children chasing the late afternoon. "I love you, feet." A strange silence as I hear my words caught by the wind and then gone again. I exhale, push my way up the hill. "I love you, knees and hamstring muscles. I love you, abs. I love you, arms. I love you, I love you, I love you."My voice grows louder, my footsteps clanging on the pavement. This is not the day where I tell my body one more time that it should be better than it is. This is not the day where I ask it to run faster or farther, to go without, to have brighter skin and bluer eyes and curlier hair. This is not the day when I accept that cool, matter-of-fact voice in my head that whispers to push just a little bit more and things would heal."I love you, abs." Now I'm laughing at how ridiculous I must look, all sweat and hair falling out from its bobby-pinned obedience, limbs waving in the breeze and lungs gulping air. "I love you, body."On this day I won't ask it to be anything else. I won't demand the stride of the gazelle. I won't say, "be smaller, be taller, be more beautiful.""I love you."I will feed it those rare, sweet words of satisfaction, and hold it out before the world: one among the many miracles that sing His praise.Love, hilary