to my someday daughter

While Preston and I are on sabbatical for the summer in our letter writing, I thought I would keep up with letters. These, though, are letters with a bit more of my imagined, someday life, and a little bit less of the every day. I wanted to store them up, these daydreams, because even though we should live in the present, there is something to every once in a while glancing out and imagining the horizon.Dear daughter,I'm writing this to you before I know you. You and I are family, and we will always be family, but before I bear the weight and wonder of being your mom, I'm a 21 year-old girl making her first steps in the world. I'm single now, so I haven't married your dad, and I'm in my very first job after college. Every morning I get up and groan, because I'm not an early riser and it takes all my willpower to stagger towards that first cup of coffee. But you'll change that for me, with your hunger and your need and your soft, sweet self. You'll change so many things for me.I want to write you this letter telling you about being a girl, a daughter and sister and how in this first years of being a grownup it's hard. I'm not very good at it, sweetheart. I mess up a lot. I don't call my friends back sometimes, or I forget birthdays, or I snap at my parents and wish my siblings would stay out of my hair. I don't really know how to manage a budget or figure out when to say "no." I'm all tangled up, and I have a thousand questions for every answer I get. When you get here, to being a 21 year-old, I want you to find this again and laugh because your mom was a tangled mess and then show it to me. I promise, I'll remember to have grace for you.I fell in love with writing letters years ago. I stuck them in the mailboxes of my friends in high school (yes, Aunt Lillie got many of them, which I know you'll find someday in the box of precious things I keep next to my side of the bed). I wrote them to teachers, to people I barely knew, thanking them for being them. It's been the most wonderful kind of writing I've ever done, and when I write to your siblings, now or in the future, there is nothing I want to do more than tell you how much I love you or how extraordinary you are or how amazed I still am at how our words carry love with them. I want you to know this, beautiful girl. I want you to know that your words have the power to offer love to a hurting world. I want you to know that often, it is that smile you smile and the, "I love you, Mom" that breaks my heart right open.I've been imagining writing this to you for a while. Right now in my life the closest I get to children are the beautiful girls I get to babysit. They're going to be big when you arrive, years after I rocked them in the hallways of their parents' houses. But when I held them, and learned to feed them Cheerios and make silly faces, when I learned to play "Winter Song" and "Poison & Wine" on repeat 167 times, God was preparing me for you. I'm learning how to love you, even now, when I don't know you. I don't know how He does that. But somehow, He does.I'm lost when it comes to love, too, at this moment in my life. I want it, but I don't know what it looks like. I'm learning to keep my heart open and at the same time safe. I'm learning to be patient. I have many days when I drive home from work, through the same roads and looking at the same sunset, and I wonder, "Where is he?" And I am sure someday you'll wonder that too. I promise that when you ask me, I will tell you what my mom, what Gram, tells me now: When it lights, it lights. She always laughed when she said it, and smiled at Granddad. They're teaching me every day to laugh and trust, and I will try to teach you, too.I promise I will love you even when you break things that I told you not to touch. I promise I will love you when you sneak out of the house and put me and your dad in a total panic. I promise to leave the office and pick you up at school when you get sick. I promise to make your dance recital costume even though I can't sew to save my life (I guess I promise to learn how to sew before you arrive), and buy you new soccer cleats or a lacrosse stick or an extra copy of the script for Hamlet when you lose yours. I promise, love, to be a safe harbor for you. I promise your dreams are big and beautiful and even though I can't imagine what great things you'll do, I promise to remind you that God's love is more powerful than anything in this world. He has good plans for you, love, and I promise His love will carry you even in the days when my love and Dad's love and Aunt Abby and Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe and all the rest of this crazy family's love can't.Until I meet you, I promise to learn everything I can from the wise people in my life. I promise to be a 21 year-old and mess up and learn from it. I promise to soak in the world and read good books and dream about being a provost and apply to grad schools. I'll seek the truth and fall into grace.And when you find this someday, we will laugh over it and remember that love crosses all kinds of distances, even time.Love,hilary (your someday mom)

God is, and is from the beginning, a letter to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share about mystery, wonder about faith and the long walk of obedience, tell stories about Gossip Girl and God's grace. We would love for you to join us in the comments. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I'm in floundering between getting home late from work, trying to find time to run, eat dinner with my family, and watch installment 2 of LOTR with my youngest brother, Joe. I decided that it was time I immersed myself in those stories again. And they are rich, and I grab his arm compulsively as I watch, fearful for Frodo and Sam, hopeful in the wild goodness of Aragorn and I am reminded that this is a good story because it reminds us to be overjoyed at the triumph of good, and fearful of the power of evil.I've been wondering about this business of trusting God every day. It is cheap and trite and silly to tell you that when I made that big promise, in the dirt of the road next to the pond, when I held my hands up against the cool May rain and gave my life to Him, I didn't realize it would be so hard.I didn't realize it, though. I didn't realize I would come home and be angry that things are still unclear. I don't know what I thought - if I pray the magic prayer of surrender, the heavens opened and the mystery of my life is explained - but I pull on my running shoes every evening and race off down the road, pissed off that the world is still uncertain, still broken and bleeding, and my own small heart is still just as fickle as it ever was. I promised to trust Him and now He is asking me to trust Him. I wrote blog posts about how good it is to trust in Jesus, and now I am confessing that it is hard and I don't like it.In a conversation with a friend the other day, they suggested that our philosophy about God should begin from "God is, and is from the beginning without beginning." I want to stray down the paths of Heidegger's non-being vs. being debate, or question what the word, "beginning" means. I want the rabbit holes of the academic. I want to keep my mind humming with the knots of theology and philosophy, ask with Bonhoeffer about those first three chapters of Genesis. I think if I ask enough questions about who God is, and how He is, I might keep myself too busy to do the work of trusting Him. If I tangle myself up in working out what any of this means, I will not have to live out the meaning that has already been given to me.But that is the work before us, isn't it? To resist the temptation to hide behind our towers of books and papers, to trust that God is, and is from the beginning without beginning, and to believe in His Name. The work before me is that daily run where I yell and God reminds and I grow quiet in the reality of His presence. The work before me is the long day that I choose to end with love for my brother and the Lord of the Rings. The work before me is to open the old, beautiful Book of Common Prayer my mentor gave me, its leather cover sweetened and cracked with age, and pray.So in this season, of the small, daily work, let's take a rest from letters. A small sabbatical for you and me, to do our daily work. To put our hearts and minds to the work before us, where we each are. Let's pause, in the midst of asking, "Who is God?" and "What is this life of faith?" and listen to Him answer us.And then, when this season has passed and we are each settled into the difficult and the daily, write to me and tell me what He's told you.Love, and grace and peace for the next season, and may the joy of Almighty God go before you.Love,HilarySo, dear readers of these letters, we are going on sabbatical for a little while, to rest in our work and ponder new things. Keep visiting Preston's space, if you haven't become a regular reader yet... His space is full of good things to wonder and read. 

around the best table, a letter to Preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share our journey with grace and mystery, bits of Gossip Girl, and the wonder of fumbling our way through. We would love it if you'd join us. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I am typing this on a very small iPhone screen, sitting in a house in Washington DC. I don't quite know how to type quickly, my thumbs pressed together, so each letter seems more like a choice, something deliberate and with purpose. I am sure I am exaggerating how the iPhone has deep meaning for the poet in me- but then, I'm prone to hyperbole and I like the idea that this small device might make us think twice about how we form words. How beautiful they are.You wrote in your letter that though you bake bread, you are not the host. I think this is perhaps the thing we forget most often in our deep hope to love others, to make a space for them, to feed them with good food and compassion and grace. We think it's our compassion or our grace or our food. But if it's truest, as you say, we are feeding them not from our richness (what do we have?) but from His.You ask a good question, though, about how we find a harmony between our bread baking and His table. I believe there is harmony - that He is delighted to make this a potluck. You bring bread, and I bring the apple pie I am famous for and someone else brings the snap peas and the carrots and we offer all the work of our hands back into His table. He loves that we do that. I am sure of it.But we go wrong when we more sincerely desire that others see us as filled, the richer, the wiser. We want to be bravest and best. We want our food to be what really satisfies.I want this so often. My metaphor is not yours- you bake bread and I build rooms- but the problem is the same. We search for our worth in another's need of us. We labor to fill others so that we can feel full. And the cycle is a beautiful train wreck that repeats: they are hungry, we try harder, they are still hungry, we fear and panic and worry.So we are not the host and we are not the bread of life or the one preparing a room for in the Father's house. We are knee to knee with the least of these. We are laughing and gathering His abundance at the same table.Perhaps it is always and only the lesson to receive grace: poured out around us and everywhere flowing.Love,Hilary

He builds the house, a letter to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share about mystery, wonder about faith and the long walk of obedience, tell stories about Gossip Girl and God's grace. We would love for you to join us in the comments. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I write this to you while you are on retreat, away from iPhones, computers, the incessant buzz and hum of another notification. You're away to think, and to pray, to draw near to the well and draw water. I hope it is full to overflowing, that well, this weekend. I hope that you draw near only to find that He always and already there.I called this post, "He builds the house." I know it's technically true - Psalm 127 tells us that He does. He builds the house, and if we build it without Him, we labor in vain. Sometimes this means I don't get to build a house.I picture myself with a blueprint, staring at my handiwork. The perfect job will go here, the boyfriend here, the right amount of distance between me and my parents will go here. I will make just this much money, have this kind of monthly budget that allows for all of this coffee drinking and friendship building. I will put in a special room just for all the letter writing I will do, to all the people I love.It starts to rain. It's rained here for a week without stopping. And it's not the pretty rain that comes after a drought and cools the air. No, this is the steady, incessant, plodding rain. The rain that drips out of the sky. It's halted day trips and walks to the pond, it's halted running in the early morning light. I hold my blueprint up against the sky and watch as it starts to bleed, the heavy raindrops crashing into those perfectly laid plans, those big ideas of what it would be, and how. Unless the Lord builds the house...I am mad about it. I can tell because I keep having frantic dreams right before I wake up, dreams where I'm always running around, looking for someone or something. I wake up near tears with worry, and have to tell myself over and over again that it wasn't real, that person wasn't looking for me, that I didn't lose something precious, that her mother wasn't actually giving a science presentation at my school to which I walked in twenty minutes late and had to sit in shame in the front row (the dreams are strange, let me tell you). I'm angry at God for making me wait, angry that I'm angry, impatient with my lack of patience.I'm mad at myself for not wanting to count 1,000 gifts again, for not reminding myself of the story of how He wildly blessed and even more wildly promised. But I'm mad at Him too, for giving me a pen and a heart that dreams and for this blueprint I keep showing Him that He says, "Unless the Lord builds the house." Why did you give me this pen? I want to scream. Why do you let us dream anyway, if all you're going to say when I show you what I've made is that You must build the house?And while I'm crumpling up my paper in frustration, I'm reminded that somewhere else, Jesus talks about building houses.

²⁴ “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. ²⁶ But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.²⁷ The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Unless the Lord builds the house.Unless knowing Jesus is the hope and reassurance and terrifying reality and ultimate promise.Unless I let the rain come down and bleed my beautiful blue pen into the smudges and uncertainties again of trusting that He who builds the real house? He is good.Love, and grace and peace to you to trust Him who builds houses and draws water from the well and loves us with everlasting love,hilary

we are called to praise, a letter to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We write about life, and laughter, grace and mystery, Gossip Girl and how we stumble through faith. Won't you join us, and share your stories too? You can read Preston's last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I can't lie - today, my morning run sucked. It was humid already at 7:30, I was tired and my feet didn't want to move. I barely trudged up the hills past my house. I cut the run short at a random street corner where a flock of third graders with thick plastic lunchboxes twittered to each other about summer.I don't know why today it was so hard to be thankful for nature, why I had to force myself to name things that are beautiful: lavender growing wild by a mailbox, the splash of a turtle slipping into the pond, the cheerful gossip of the birds. I usually know how to name those things, how to count those one thousand gifts. I usually know how to run with hands outstretched in joy.I'm glad that it was hard this morning.Maybe that makes me crazy - after all, who wishes for praise to be more difficult? - and I admit, I don't really know why I think it's such a good thing. But as someone who wants to spend her life holding beauty up to others as an offering? I think I have to learn how when the running is uphill and my mood is foul and nothing seems worth praising.We are called to praise, Preston. All of us. Some of us praise by what we build in words and with two by four planks of wood. Some of us praise by the proofs we discover and the dinner parties we host. Some of us praise by sitting next to the seven year old while they throw up or solve division problems and some of us by prayer in a monastery in rural Kentucky.It is not optional.I believe that more now, having run down a street filled with beauty and wanted nothing to do with it. I felt for the first time the real tug of resistance, the tug of, "Oh, come on, it's just a flower and a mailbox, it's just birds, it's just the morning, and who cares, really." I wanted to say that to God this morning, to laugh that He spends His delight on something as un-spectacular as turtles in a pond.But what I will miss if I disobey His call to delight! I'm going to miss turtles in a pond and lavender by a mailbox and mismatched stones catching the sun in Italy. I'm going to miss sitting at my kitchen table drinking good coffee, singing praise for the world.It was good for me to forget how to sing praise for a morning. It was good to resent it, if only to feel more the call to love what He has made. Maybe it is G.K. Chesterton, after all, Preston:

“But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun.; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic monotony that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

Today, may the delight of God in this world overwhelm you with the desire to put words to your praises.Love, hilary 

He is more than glorious, a letter to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We write about life, and laughter, grace and mystery, Gossip Girl and how we stumble through faith. Won't you join us, and share your stories too? You can read Preston's last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I write this to you a little later than I wish, in the strange new world of wordpress (I need a tutoring session about how to use it), sitting in a coffee shop as a post-graduate. It's a strange thing to call myself, but somehow the title also fits. We came to the end at the right time, didn't we? Even when we wish it wasn't the end, or we'd like to gather everyone together and keep them in our hearts and our backyards... there is something to this ending that feels sweet and true.I keep wanting to write to you about these wild gifts I was given at the end - time with good people, time with good words, Rilke and vacuuming to The Civil Wars and dancing in the car to "Shake it Out" by Florence and the Machine. I want to tell you about how I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the blessings to end, or for the bitterness, the sadness, the other side of blessing that is ache to appear.And there was ache, but even the ache was beautiful. Even the ache was blessing. I am convinced that God is more than glorious, Preston. I am convinced His glory can't fit into our small words for it, that when we try to make consonants and vowels spell out His glory He laughs in a delighted way, and shatters our certainty with a new revelation. More than glorious. More than good.I went on a run a little over a week ago. I do this often, as you know. And I forced myself on this run to pray out loud. As I rounded the corner to enter the woods, I told myself out loud, "It's time to talk to Jesus, Hilary." And so I began to pray, not sure what to tell Him, not sure if there was anything to say except, "Lord, what next? What's going to happen to all of this? Where will all this blessing go next week, when these people and this place and all this beauty is changed?"It started to rain softly, and I kicked up pebbles and mud as I got frantic, my voice growing louder and my footsteps more urgent. And then I stumbled upon the water, and stopped short. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. And the Lord said, What are you doing here, Hilary?And Preston, before the God who is more than glorious, more than good, I got on my knees. On the road. In the gravel. In front of dog walkers and other runners and a fly fisherman trying to hook something out of the water early in the morning. I got on my knees and flung my arms out to Heaven and I answered Him: I am here to give You my life, Jesus. I am here to give You myself. I wish for better words, Preston. But for now, I offer you this: He is more than glorious.all my wild love,hilary

know him and make him known, a letter to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here.Dear Preston,By now you know that I'm ending my time on this blog. I don't know if we got to talk about that, somewhere between theology of the arts and teaching, between moleskines and meditations on Blair and Chuck and Serena (she needs some serious character development, that one), but it's true. I'm leaving this space on Sunday and I'm starting to write out the wild love. It's so strange to think about, leaving a blogging space I feel so comfortable with, leaving behind the 320 posts, the five minutes of last spring, the first post that got a serious number of hits or someone retweeted or commented on...But somehow in all of this leaving I felt the tug in my heart towards this new wild love space. The title even came to me as I was sitting, thinking about whether or not I would really like blogging somewhere else. And I thought to myself, what would I even call it? And then the name. The wild love. Because that is what we are called to live. 

That's what these last four weeks of living have taught me, Preston. That love should be wild and free and given away. That we should share ourselves. That we should not waste time pretending to be self-sufficient, but smile as we offer our neediness and recognize it in each other, laugh that we are helpless and small and dependent, and then hold each other's hearts.So I'm going to make a new space over there, and journey along in the new, post-grad world, and I really hope that you come along, too. I'm so excited about the new space, but also so nervous and unsure of what it will be and how it will be different. So much change, and so much the same. I think that balance is where the beauty is revealed.

In a devotional that the whole student body received this week, they offered the prayer of general thanksgiving from the BCP. I love those old words. And I read it with eyes towards next year and wild love. The prayer begins,"Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us.

We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world,

for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love."

Give thanks for the mystery of love. Can you imagine? Giving thanks for all that we don't understand about love, for all that defies reason and expectation, for everything it demands in the dark and without explanation? The beauty, and the wonder, and the mystery. 

And then it ends,

"Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know him and

make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things.

Amen."

That we might know him and make him known. The prayer of thanksgiving becomes the prayer of transformation. Because we give thanks for the mystery and beauty, we can pray also that He would live in us, and we in Him, that we would know Him and make Him known. We give thanks that we might know Him. 

As it all ends here, it all seems more beautiful and more fleeting. As I walk across the Quad, around the pond, pack sheets and towels and clothes into duffel bags, as I type out the last few posts into this blogger window - I want to give thanks for the beauty, the wonder and the mystery.

I want to know him and make him known.

Perhaps that's the wild love of next year. And all our years beyond it. Perhaps that's the command and the hope. Perhaps, after all, that's the real work.

(wild) love, and grace and peace to wonder, and rejoice,

hilary