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

when we are not competing

I go to the gym and almost start to cry. There is a row of treadmills and a row of elliptical machines, pristine from the spray-and-wipe-down routine religiously followed by most of the gym-goers. I don't know where to start, and so I choose an elliptical machine, a familiar one, and I plug in my headphones.But I can't shake this worry that starts after about minute 3 that the soccer girls next to me are much better at this. I can't shake the worry that the woman to my left is decidedly unimpressed with the level I put my resistance at and that she is better because hers is over 30 and mine is just 22. I keep my eyes fixed on the orange blinking lights, minute by minute, and amid the shouts of encouragement from the first string center forward to the striker who are running faster than I will probably ever run in my life, I start to calculate it - more loved based on calories burned or miles run, better person, more virtuous version of herself, actually excellent, more good and beautiful than me.A little while ago I read this post from the lovely woman over at Scissortail Silk, about we aren't each other's competition, not one more standard to measure against in this already overmeasured world.And I am fired up and I start this post, my blog says, at the end of March. I think, we are not competing, and I wanted to write and say it out loud, that we, the bakers and butchers and lawyers and authors and midwives, we are all in the ragged band of beautiful making our way towards heaven.We are all, I want to tell you, the raw art, the rare creation. We are all, not in the diluted universals we always use, but in the particular concentration of mitochondrial DNA and endless cells recombining and holding us together, in the concentrated, intense, fiercest way - we are all and each the uniqueness we cannot fathom.I wanted to say this when I first read those true words - we are not each other's competition - but somewhere I lost the message. I went out into the world thinking I had the voice of a prophet and I still preached a fear of the bathroom scale. I still proclaimed scarcity.It can be hard to remember that the work of becoming well is a series of hills you fall down, and the falling and rising, they live together. And so I marched out in March thinking I could wear the banner of the not-competition, and it is May, and I am still sewing the pieces together.But here is what I know, what I preach next to you, in my nervous ponytail making our way through the jungle of the kingdom of God:God is too particular about us to compare.God is too intent on us, on the molecules of being, on how we move and lie down and arise, to watch the numbers at the gym and mark us in a rank of better to worse, against each other.If it is true that God wrestled with Jacob, if it is true that Jesus appeared to Mary and called her name, Mary, like that, each syllable resounding with news of the resurrection and life -then we cannot be competing.Because as Jesus calls her Mary, so Jesus calls me Hilary. So Jesus calls you, calls the striker and the first string center forward, calls the Zumba class ladies and the lawyers and butchers and authors.If God is really wrestling with each of us, our bones pressing against God, our lungs stretched to keep breathing the air that gives the life as we wrestle with the Lifegiver,then we are not competing.We are each the beloved, particular, wrestlers with God.We are each the remarkable made alive again.We are each so singularly loved that God laughs at our comparisons, touches our hip socket with His laughter.And so shall I be delivered.Love,hilary

this is a place of remembrance

"I AM DONE WITH THIS!" I scream it over and over, part hysterically crying, part hyperventilating, the oxygen fighting to enter my body. "I am done. I am done. I am. DONE." Who am I talking to, on the drive back to campus to charge my now-dead phone? What am I talking about?Is it the ever present shadow of bride to be workouts, the ticker of the treadmill and the stairmaster, the well meaning tight lipped smiles of the people in the gym all out to prove we love our bodies, love ourselves, have the balance, have the motivation, the stamina?And the way that I tell myself that 382 calories is insufficient for an afternoon, add up the numbers, spend them again and again, streams of numbers divided and earned, calculated on the drive from Starbucks to work and home again, and so I climb stairs for an extra ten minutes because you must, you must, be above 400 every time. You must or else what is the point and do you know what will happen, the wild collapse?"I am done with this" - with what?With the endless looping ribbons of thought about whether it is worth writing a blog post about something as small as climbing stairs at the gym on a Wednesday, that who needs or wants to read such a thing, with the frustration that even when I start to write it I want to tell it better, that there is some other voice asking if this is the right word choice, if I would get more traffic by using some other words, if I got to the Jesus part of this quicker then I would be a better blogger, a better writer, a better Hilary.With the frustration that there is no clean telling of a story that I live in my skin and bones with oxygen that still fights to enter my body and leave it, the most common of journeys, the most transforming of journeys. With how much I have paused and deleted and revisited, thinking I will find a new ending if I hit "save" enough times.There is a Jesus part to this. There is a part about God. But I can't run there because when I run there I get pushed back into the hurricane. We have arenas of salvation, arenas of sanctification, Julie told me once. This is mine: that I am not allowed to run from the fact that I struggle, wonder, worry, count and obsess and overplan how to keep my body in the form I have chosen as right enough (but always, the enough, because there must be room for improvement, there must be more zumba classes and more pilates and more of everything else that might make me better). This is the arena of sanctification, me and God in the ring, wrestling as much with each other as with the bystanders, the voices offering those classes and the quick fixes.Didn't Jacob call the place Peniel, where he encountered God and yet his life was delivered? And wasn't it there a striving with God? And wasn't there the fierceness of blessing, the ache for it, every muscle overworked with the longing?And I build a place of remembrance between my dashboard and my heart, a remembering that somehow my life is preserved. That's the Jesus part to this story. That when I drive away from the overcounting and the oxygen fights with my body for permission to breathe again is that this whole post is a wrestling. This whole story is a wrestling.A day after I scream there is a cancelled appointment, an idea in my head that I'll go to an extra class, fit in one more day at the gym, an email to my father to ask if he can bring the gym bag I left behind with him, and not five minutes later his head pokes around the door to say he is already here, he can't go back for it.Who will say this is not all a wrestling?Nor this writing my own place of remembering that my life is being delivered?