dear hilary: a gradual slope

Dear Hilary,There was a boy, a wild and free and brave boy who did the best he could to hurt me as little as possible. and he really made me braver, trusting God more, and less selfish than i thought possible. regardless of whether or not i would've chosen him as husband - i, undoubtedly, still love him. essentially, though, he had to say 'i like you, alot. but not always.' and now that we've both had about a month off work, we're back in the same office - not simply completing the same tasks in separate cubicles, but a part of the same ministry - planting and growing the Word, in a community that's washing each other's feet kind of family. we're not afforded the opportunity to 'have space.'How do i help my heart mend, not simply from being hurt, but from being hurt that his eyes are light and as sparkling as ever; he talks to me without regret or sadness, and that seems to have been the case from day one. i'm learning to let go, but what do i do about the lump in my throat that comes when i see how easily his fingers let loose?Love,I still notice itDear I still notice,It must have been winter, because there was ice on the sidewalk during our three minute meander to the theater. It must have been almost spring though, too, because I almost fell once or twice as the ice melted under our feet, a hopeful kind of melting, as if the ground itself wanted to be free of the long months of February and March. I'd known him more than a year. I'd passed notes for a few months. Once I tied one with some blue ribbon I found in an unused classroom during lunch and I impulsively wrote, "love hilary" on the outside of the note, creased it again and again in my pocket before I gave it to him.So it must have been the end of winter when he told me that "he liked me too much" to have ever wanted a relationship. He told me almost laughing, a joke we were sharing that I couldn't catch the punchline of. I remember vaguely that he wore the same jacket to school every day, a brown frayed corduroy one that made me wonder if he was cold walking to and from his car every morning across the frozen parking lot. He said so many things in that walk to theater, his laughter moving so swiftly to confusion and then something that sounded like pity. Because he liked me too much, we'd make an amazing power couple, but you see, as friends.I saw him at school every day for the next four months. We had lunch in a group together every week, his brown corduroy jacket and his old sneakers and all I could think when it was happening was how could he laugh like that, tell stories about his guitar or the rival high school debate team, how could he be so whole, while I sat and thought my life would surely end and it could never be the same and it was never and always and everything, and I was heartbroken.So I wanted to tell you and me both, me that girl not all that long ago, who longed for him to long for her, who wondered (and still wonders) about the wholeness we think we understand in other people - I wanted to tell us that hearts mend on a gradual slope. You walk through each day and notice one hundred things. You walk through the next, and perhaps you only notice 97, perhaps there are three things, the way he holds a coffee cup, the laugh he has when he heard something that makes him nervous as well as happy, the sound of his fingers against a keyboard, that somehow fade. And the next day, maybe something comes back, and something else leaves, and time is the healer not because time makes anyone less the wonder that you always knew them to be, but because we move in the slow swirl of the months and days, and we are freed by the movement. You don't know how he is healing - and I say it in the present tense because even if he ended things, he must also heal, mend, build back together his self from the threads and pieces of what's come before. How he moves along the gradual slope is hidden from you. How he heals in the midst of seeing your lovely self, and all the hundred small things he knows about you - how you hold a coffee cup and laugh in the morning and sign your name on an office birthday card - is his. Yours is yours. If you can, try not to compare how it looks like he feels to how you know yourself to feel.You mend by moving in the swirl of those months, by sharing the space you must share but not looking too long or too worried in his direction at the conference table.We are freed by the movement. We are freed by the way time so gently journeys us back and away and yes, at the pace it must be, you will find yourself looking again - and you have let go.Love,hilary

the ache is still beautiful, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I will never, ever, ever, EVER do long-distance.Was that what I said? Did I say that to you once, in a conversation, in passing, probably tilting my head the way I do when I'm not sure what I'm saying is true, but I want to convince you that I'm being really thoughtful? I imagine you were painting in your garage at the time, and I could hear the paint hit the canvas with some kind of fierceness that I didn't understand. You paint forcefully, and sometimes I think maybe that's the way of making beauty; a little forceful, the way that brightness asks for strength to bear it. Sometimes, when we're on Skype and you can't see me, I close my eyes, and listen to you painting, and the silence says more than my words will.But me and that long distance. My vehemence when I said those words seems to grow in my memory, a defiance to it I'm not sure was there, but makes a story somehow wilder, so I tell it that way. I was stamping my feet against the old hardwood of my bedroom floor, or something like that, insisting that the way of love must be just something daily, something clear and easy and full of Friday nights barefoot on a beach or along a boardwalk somewhere and that attempting to build across miles and continents and time changes was the worst idea, ever.Never mind the stories I have been told my whole life. Never mind the long walk through the woods behind campus that sunlit afternoon when my dear friend told me that our choices weren't ever about distance, but about steadfastness in the face of it. That distance could be agonizingly hard but that the space created between those two distinct places, and those two distinct people, would be nearer and closer, a mystery closed to those who watch it. And of course that afternoon, when my mother opened the pages of her own writing to me, the binding frayed and worn by love and how she, like me, said she'd never do long distance.But I knew the ache already, I said. I knew the work. I knew the uncertainty. I would never give it a try.I knew so little, P. I knew so little of the ache.Because this? This ache is beautiful.This is the ache of remembering how we sit side by side at that kitchen table and make worlds with our words, offering each other living water for the journey. This is the ache of how I can hear how you laugh with me, almost falling off your chair, how I can feel your hand brush the small of my back as we go up for Eucharist, how I remember the way you look at me sometimes, this look of wonder that just takes my breath away.This is the ache of how our hearts whisper loud across time zones but gentle when we're in the same room. This is the ache of wanting to tell you when I burst in the door out of breath from running with God that I realized, just then, the radical grace that is when God and I are quiet, together, how I can feel Him running with me but how sometimes, when I complain to Him (like I did the other day) that He feels far away His words are sharp and quick about the reason He runs with me (love, and sanctification, and my feeble heart). I'm longing to tell you, not in messages or typed words, but in the look on my face and the unspoken question I know you'll ask me, and how I will answer just by nodding and smiling. And we will have said a thousand things without saying them.I knew nothing about the wild love of long distance. I knew nothing about how the bridges it builds withstand the longest days and heaviest hearts, how the spaces of Skype and these two blogs and how you write my name on an envelope, they are spaces that are gifts, too. And I am the first to say, to you, to whoever might read this, that the distance aches and hurts and the dip and sway of it sometimes knocks me over.But I'd not be me if I didn't admit to you, that more truly, I knew so little of this, how beautiful it is. How wondrous they seem now, the people I thought foolish for trying something I called impossible. How beautiful, how brave. How I now want to call each of them up and say, "I need you to know I see your courage and your strength, how you wove the threads that kept you, cocooned in love." How I want to tell them that the ache is agonizing and how I miss you,but how their ache, and ours, is still beautiful.Love, always,hilary

when i am twenty-three

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary OliverI end my work day fifteen minutes early so that I can go for a run in the woods. I'm so angry I think I can't quite see straight - angry at myself first, because I fell for a story that wasn't coming true, angry at how when I preached him as a wild gift to my closest friend in the car one afternoon at a red light, God was whispering the truth and I didn't believe it. But my feet move my heart. The prayer, anger to desperate to confused, finally makes it way to the still waters. "God," I pace before, palms opened skyward, "I promised You that this life was Yours. Here. So take it back from me, this life for You, take it back into the mystery of Your will.Tell me - --It is the first time any reader I didn't know from my college days ever emailed me a question for dear hilary. I am sitting on my bed thinking about how I need to probably try to write something again, because it has been weeks and didn't I say I would be better, and not get so discouraged, and not let the poems fall through my fingers because of my fear? They tap out the email with a gentleness, a trust, and in the blackened night blanketed with stars I hear a glimmer that maybe I shouldn't forsake writing - maybe I should just wait.What is it --She and I find five hours on her couch with tea not enough time, because the things that pass between us are so widely varied, journeying among us, our stories keeping us company as afternoons fade to evening, as I look at her in surprise, again and again, because her wisdom is gentler than most. We talked once about the space in conflict, how mediators must create the conversation's parameters but not participate, and we wonder together about what kind of heart you must have to do such work, and I tell her then, that a part of me is so hungry to do just that, but how could I begin? How could I be a builder of spaces and homes for conversations? She smiles, shakes her head, reaches for her teacup. "But of course you already do this."you plan to do --And somewhere, in April, in a bar where I stole a reserved seat at the bar from a couple who apparently decided to wait, or at least, I hope that's what they did, over the rim of my martini glass, I told her in hushed laughter and surprise that this man, I was falling for him, had been for a lot longer than I had admitted, and now what was I to do, feeling the way I did, him so far away and me here, drinking this, in this bar? And she laughed bright in the crowded space, her hand briefly closing over mine. "You tell the truth." We laughed and laughed that night, about the way that I brought Lizzy Bennet to life, about how love is always out ahead of us, beckoning us forward. In the car that night on my way home, I whispered, "I see a little better who you might want me to be, I think." And God said, "Hilary, you are Mine."with your one --There aren't words enough for the way this year has unfolded. Perhaps there will never be, and I cling to the older, better question because it is a kind of promise, on its own, that I don't ever stop asking or need to stop asking about this life, all tangled by belonging and wandering and returning. And I cannot stop wondering, not now a year later, about what we inherit from our former selves and what we give them in return, about how we love, and where, and untamed spaces we go running into all for the sake of love.wild and precious life? --Oh, it is a wild and precious life, Mary Oliver, and I'm grateful alongside you.Love,hilary

dear brothers

Dear brothers,You're each in your own worlds a bit these days, high school and college, relationships and summertime, work and landscaping and extra physics prep and climbing trees. You're together in some of those worlds, when you disappear into the cave of the living room to play video games or watch Duck Dynasty or the Sox game.I don't think I tell you often enough how much you have been teaching me.Take that drive home for instance, the other night, when you were willing to listen to me while we played Eric Church off my iPod, how you told me about your excitement for our someday-families being close to each other, about the cousins we haven't ever had before, about the wonder, about the time. You and I don't always talk about the future, and we're in a forever competition about who knows more Harry Potter trivia (you do, but I will never give up the fight on it), but when you said that I could feel that future smile at us from wherever it lives right now. I could imagine it, all the siblings drawn closer together, children and spouses and laughter, more food than we could possibly eat, the sun lingering on the horizon line just for us, just for those summers.You heard me, and I heard that you have a bigger heart and a braver one and that man, I have so much to learn from you about the kind of love that really forgives and forgets and chooses joy even when we're pissed off. Do you know that? That those years of Calvin and Hobbes at the kitchen table, the years of us eating with paper napkins and a simply set table and not having the cable or the new computers - that all of that, it has made you a tremendous man? This past winter, when I realized I was homesick for you even though we live in the same house, I tramped out through the snow to where you were creating a different world, your imagination still wilder and wider than most, and you taught me how to climb the tree and look out over the back yard, even though I'm scared of heights? Do you remember that? And how you taught me about building your own forge from the bits of old metal we don't need anymore laying around behind the shed and even though we didn't say much afterwards, that afternoon I sat on my bed and cried and laughed with God that you, my youngest brother, are who you are.And then there are the coffee mornings, older younger brother, and how we slip into a routine without realizing it, our hearts beating out on our sleeves, in the quiet space we draw between eggs and toast and unlimited refills. There are those mornings when I confess my jealousy to you, where you teach me how to ask forgiveness, really ask for it, where I tell you that I am afraid I might never find what I'm looking for and you so gently remind me how much of it has already found me.You and I drying the dishes while the kids we love refuse to fall asleep and their parents will be home soon? You and I watching Raylan (me terrified), the house gone to bed? You teach me to love the every day and to be watchful over the people I love. You teach me to care more about the condition of my kindness than my clothes and to treat others with more respect than I would probably offer on my own. I run upstairs to you in the midst of the visit that is changing my life and you're awake, and we lie on our mattresses and talk into the night about how this is becoming real, and you're there with wisdom and patience and you remind me that God is good. And on the drive home from church and lunch I caught my breath again because I saw a truck that looked like yours and I remembered that in our family you are always the first to offer peace to our hearts and slowest to anger and in this, God shows me what it means to love as He loves. I saw a truck that looked like yours, and I just had to smile. What a gift you are.So brothers, who are so different and yet of one mind, all I wanted to ramble about in this blog post, which has gone on a long while now, is that you teach me, and you remind me, between Duck Dynasty and the grill and the summertime, that there is not one thing in this world quite like having brothers - and not one thing in this world like you.Love,your sister

it isn't a thunderstorm

I left him a message early in the morning yesterday, trapped as we are in this moment in the pull of telephone lines and frayed Internet cables. With all that we have to say to each other, with all the questions the pour out and the long pauses that pour back in, I wonder some days if we are causing power outages in hometowns somewhere along the highways that separate us. Town after town, momentarily offering up their electricity so that we can have just five more minutes, just one last smile on Skype.I keep thinking about this new season, after driving through the early, easy morning with my mother, talking about how we know the things we know, and how surprising it can be when we know more than we think we do, or think we should, and I think to myself that knowledge no more obeys me than you or anyone else.I shouldn't know so certainly as I type the tiny letters into the tiny box on the screen too small to carry the amount of love I need it to, should I? I shouldn't, because we live by a calendar of boxes of days, because we think there is always an acceptable line running through time, because for every story we have the one we think it is supposed to be.In my head love was always a thunderstorm, violent and wild and untamed. In my head it was like the ocean and you in a canoe, paddling until your sides ached and you let yourself be capsized, let yourself become lost, let yourself be overturned.The story I told myself about how love must work was that kind of hurricane weather and a purple sky and the smell of rain hurtling over the fields emptied of other people and with the wheat bending down in deference to a wind. That's how it would be real - a chaos of love and lightning.There isn't a thunderstorm.This unnerves me. So I go running, yell at the afternoon, where was the hurricane, by which I would know? Where was the thunder across this landscape, the wild and chaotic arrival of love? How did I miss it? Wasn't that how God would tell me?When I stop moving, the gentle breeze comes off the water with its early summer taste and there is the sun that last year reminded me that all time is about belonging to Jesus, and the water so wide and still my whole self grows small in its presence. No, it will not be in a thunderstorm. It will be in quiet. I look for God in fire and cloud. I look for clarification, for certainty, for a knowledge I could stand on, in a wild and obvious sign. Not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire - no, but behold I am standing on the mountain before the Lord and I hear a still, small voice.Love is not in a thunderstorm or a bright, blinding hurricane: it is morning coffee and holding hands in the car just to be sure of each other and the pause before we apologize, and the way our conversations bend back towards grace even when neither of us want to, and how he asks me to pray and doesn't care if it rambles its way towards God in the Mexican restaurant with the girl's night out next to us and our food growing colder, how we let the kids that have become like nieces and nephews to me clamber over our nice Sunday clothes and try on our sunglasses, how we do dishes together, how he knows just when my voice is about to tremble and says into the phone, "Hil. Calm your heart."I stay by the still water for a long time. And then I call him, just once more, and we both hear peace.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the love equation

Dear Hilary,I have another question for you. This year, boys have been a huge distraction.When I decided I like a boy, it begins to consume my thoughts and actions. I change the direction I walk to class just to "accidentally" run into them, I scheme ways to end up in situations with them, I make sure to get to math class early just so I can find a seat beside them. I do irrational things all the time. Maybe it's infatuation or lust, but then why does it feel so real then? It just seems impossible to shake this frame of mind. I want to stop obsessing, but at the same time I like obsessing. Is any of this natural? Is it unhealthy? Or maybe it goes deeper, and I am just desperate to be loved and treasured. Even so, my heart is aching from these boys- this is something that seems so silly but has such a legitimate weight on my heart.Love,A little obsessedDear A little obsessed,You know what I can't stand, really, truly, cross my heart shoot me ten times before you make me ... ? Settlers of Catan type games. I'm terrible at them. I lack all the strategy. And that makes me mad. And then I do something stupid, I don't want to admit it, or I do, and I basically just end up feeling pissy. Not a fun time. I like cards, I like charades, I like 20 questions that I turn into 20,000 questions, I like Mafia and a thousand other ones. But make me settle villages and stuff, and I'm sunk.So last year this boy that I really liked brought me to a friend's house on the water, and a funny group of us - maybe five or six people - sit down to play ... yep, you guessed it, one of those bridge-building farm settling monasteries and something about blocking other people's castles games. I wasn't jazzed about it, but I played the whole game.And not because that's the polite thing to do, though my mother did raise me to be polite. I did it to impress the boy. I did it to keep his attention. I did it with some well-timed doe-eyed looks in his direction, a wink or two. I can only imagine if I could see myself I would laugh - here I am, making faces at the game in my head, and then whenever he makes eye contact, holding on for dear life to those brown eyes and hoping he'd look just a bit longer.In the love equation in my head, playing this game + batting my eyelashes + walking by his office by the mailroom in my work outfit + some well placed comments about German philosophy + drinking a second cider at the bar on a Thursday night x my hope squared = LOVE.I think most of us do this, just as you describe your own love equation to me - if you sit here in math class + walk past them and if you use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate just where they might get coffee after school that day... maybe that's how you get them to see you. Maybe that will = LOVE.I want to separate out how real your feelings are from whether your changing seats in math class or walking in a different direction has a tangible effect on a relationship. Your feelings are real; you are attracted and interested, and honestly I'm going to hazard a guess that some of it is infatuation, some of it is exploration, some of it is longing, some of it is that delightful butterfly feeling when you recognize how wonderful and lovely someone is, and there is a whole lot more feeling that can be easily categorized. That will all be real no matter what you do or don't do on a given day of the week or a given Saturday night game night.And yes, honey, I think some of it is maybe a little bit much. I liked the feeling of liking someone so much I wound up playing games I didn't like and changing how I walked and what I wore and what I talked about (though I love German philosophy). When the excitement of adventuring into romantic feelings becomes the trump card in your (even small) decisions, I think it's good to take a step back. Changing your behavior won't make anyone like you more or notice you more - it won't satisfy those longings to be treasured and appreciated and loved, it won't do much of anything. Remember Sugar - real love moves freely in both directions. Love moves freely. It moves when not constrained by constantly monitoring behavior, input and output, looking for an equation that will finally work. It moves when your longing to be more of who you are meant to be, your longing to lean into the true and beautiful and good of your life, equations abandoned, is where all your energy is going.Resist the temptation to take my words and make them another voice in your head that calculates the way towards those boys or that kind of love, dear one. You can't force contentment and the growing wings as a way to get those boys to notice you. You can't ask your heart to long for the good/true/beautiful so that the boy in math class sees you - that's no different from calculating which seat.Instead open up your hands and heart and start asking the question - what are those lupine seeds I'm going to scatter today (thanks, Miss Rumphius)? How can I do one more thing to make this world a little more beautiful? Who are the people right here, right next to me? How do I make their world a little more beautiful?  We don't have to play Settlers of Catan. We don't have to change seats. Real love is on the move already. You and me, together, we can just open towards it.Love,hilary

when there are everlasting meals (guest post)

You guys remember Preston, right? We wrote letters last year, and between the time zones, the words, the Skype, and the way of things, something kind of amazing has happened. Is happening.I'm not going to say much more, right now, because I blush furiously when I try to talk about this person, and I get tongue tied, and my heart decides to practice for a marathon, and I can't stop smiling. You kind of get the picture.But today, I wrote something over at his space and well, I'd love for you to read it? You can click here.When your father is crying on the morning drive to school and whispers that Granddad died in his sleep the night before, you don’t eat the whole day.You don’t eat anything in seat 48H on Virgin Atlantic, except the chocolate pudding, and you have two helpings of that, and return to your books. You read the words over and over but they’re swimming in front of your eyes, and the turbulence outside is nothing to what’s raging in your heart.Keep reading, over here?Love,hilaryP.S. In case you didn't know, Preston is pretty amazing. I still can't quite believe the story of us. But here I go, blushing. But he is. Amazing. And I am a really lucky girl.

dear hilary: the other side of the door

Dear Hilary,I have a question. And it is this: how do you know when it's time to move on? To give up? I said I wasn't like anyone else. That I wasn't going anywhere. And I don't want to. What if the deep quiet love with a wild and crazy illogical side is the true love. I'm sure I could meet someone new some day and fall in love with them, have a passionate romance, what have you. But what if this is my only chance for that deep true sitting quietly by your side not saying a word just being there love? What if he is the person i could spend the rest of my life with, just like he was terrified of? How do I know whether to let go because clearly he isn't ready to admit anything yet? If he even actually feels the same at all? and because i don't need this back and forth pushing me away and pulling me back nonsense? Or whether to just be patient and hold on, because the wild quiet love is worth waiting for?Sincerely,Steadfast and confused.Dear Steadfast,I pondered your letter the whole time I was away, driving along the autobahn or standing in museums looking at bits of five hundred year old German script or taking pictures in front of statues of Martin Luther outside churches. I pondered while I ate cake and drank black coffee - what do I possibly say? Your letter asks the question I answer two ways and then ten and then back to one, and then wrap myself in a knot trying to sort out. I don't have a clean answer; I can only tell you a bit about what other, wiser people have told me, and tell you a bit of a story, and hope that spreads a little glow on your path as you go.Not too long ago, there was a guy - I'll call him Mr. W - that I was firmly, steadfastly convinced that I would be in a romantic relationship with. We hadn't had one up to that point, but we had the glimmering possibility of one. We had long conversations about what felt like everything on the planet, we liked a lot of the same books, we liked ideas, we liked to sit in bars over wine or gin and argue. There was chemistry, no doubt about it, and there were sparks flying, and I was sure that this was the love you talk about: wild and quiet and passionate and steadfast all at once.But. That little word, every so often, would pop up - in conversations about Mr. W with my friends, or with myself. But. There was the irreproachable fact that we weren't in the relationship I saw a glimmering possibility for. We weren't together on the couch after a long day of work. We weren't writing the letters, making the picnics, holding hands, telling our friends. I knew that possibility was there; but it hadn't been made true.So, Steadfast, I asked, point-blank, not in pretty words but in true ones. I put on makeup and thought about what I'd wear and ate half a grilled cheese in my brother's truck beforehand because I was so nervous. And the answer was no.Before the story gets too long-winded, I want to bring you with me, if you will, to an afternoon just before I asked Mr. W for the last time about the glimmering possibility of us. I am sitting on a couch in a brightly lit office, and my counselor, wise woman that she is, asks me how I feel about the prospect of having this confrontation. The words, awful, terrible, please don't make me do this please please please come to mind. But there, clanging like an iron bell (thank you, Sugar), are the words I speak:"The truth has already arrived, though, hasn't it? I'm just going to open the door for it now."She looks at me in surprise, and I mirror the same expression back to her. Yes, she says, smiling. Yes.Steadfast, I think the truth has arrived. I think you know this, from the letter you sent me, and I think you are now peeking at it from behind the door of your heart, and you have to decide if you open the door. Opening the door to the truth won't mean you get special knowledge of what the future holds. But from everything you tell me, this guy, he is saying no, and that's the truth standing at your door. The other things you know about him or his life situation, they aren't knocking. They aren't here. When all has been laid out on the table before you, and the answer is no, then no is knocking at your door.My counselor told me over and over in the year before I opened the door that it takes the time it takes. No more and no less. So I'll echo that to you, too. It takes the time it takes. You are allowed to be steadfast and confused before you open the door and walk outside and meet this guy's answer and grapple with what it offers you and what it denies.But eventually, I think, that's where you must go. You must open the door. You must look that answer in the eyes and listen to it, and let it ache, and let it roam around, and let it lead you. Because the truth will always lead you somewhere. His no will journey you to a new place. Mr. W's no took me somewhere completely unexpected. The truth does that.And here is the other thing, for your fear (and my fear) about whether there will ever be any love like the one you express in your letter - the truth also always leads towards fullness. The guy in your letter, he doesn't sound like he leads there. His no will not bring an end to the fullest love that you can imagine - it will bring only an end to one possibility, glimmering and beautiful though it was.There is fullness and joy on the other side of the door. I promise this. And in the acceptable time, I have all kinds of confidence you'll fling that door open.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the thinnest envelope

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

myself, eighteen

I'm trapped in a heard of other freshmen in Boston all wearing matching tan tee-shirts with an orientation logo emblazoned on it, promising me that if anyone wanted to think I was a cool, sophisticated college student, they will see my t-shirt and sneakers and know better.I hold my phone in the palm of my hand inside my pocket, sweating against the keys. I wait, and wait. I spend the first three weeks waiting.It would have been better if I didn't have the evidence that I had spent the last ten days in the middle of the woods in upstate New York telling a group of people I had never met before that this boy, he and I were a thing. A thing I couldn't define, a thing I couldn't quite pin down, one Starbucks lemonade and one impulsive kiss against a car door the afternoon before I left, but a thing. I was sure of it.He doesn't write back. I keep myself away from the ten digits I'm sure I've memorized in tracing them over and over in my pocket, because I don't want to text him but I want to text him, and I promise I have to let one more hour go by where I'm silent, and the hour becomes two, becomes a week... and maybe I don't know the ten digits as well anymore, was it 7-8 or 8-7 and was there a 9? But I imagine what I'd say, in my first-year indignant heart, it is rageful and spiteful and angry. And I start to spin the story.I tell my roommate in hushed whispers at 4am while we're eating cookie dough straight from the tube how much experience I have with boys. I laugh to the girls on my floor as one of them puts a 5 day Garnier hair dye in my hair about the fact that if you kiss someone in the middle of the night on a beach you're going to find you are covered in sand, completely, the next morning. I proclaim that my love language is physical touch. And I wink.God catches up to me on a walk around the quad right before first semester finals. I don't notice Him at first, walking head bent to the concrete against the early-December drizzle. But I'm worn thin in trying to write that scene between Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Birmingham Jail and his wife. I'm thinking about stage directions when I realize God is there, too.Do you want to talk about what happened?I have said no a thousand times, I remind Him. I've told the story already. It's better the way I tell it. It's safer the way I tell it. I keep walking, repeating things about the Kings and the scene in the jail. I read over the words in my head.Do you want to talk about what happened? I still say no, but perhaps there is a crack, a pause, just small enough for a bit of the Spirit to slip inside my well-walled heart. I sit on a bench, damp from the rain that just stopped. I put my books next to me, not realizing until I hear the slap of paper on water that I put them in a puddle. I cringe, and put them on the wet concrete at my feet.You cared for someone. A pause.He didn't stay. Another pause.And this means something to your heart.I start to cry. I'm eighteen and in college and I had a thing that wasn't a thing and I told that group of people in the middle of the woods in New York that I had a thing that turned out not to be a thing, and now I've told everyone that I was pleased with myself, with all that I did and said and I made it this story, and that was going to make it feel better, was going to make it safe again, I was going to be safe inside the laughter and the knowing wink and the hair dying on the first floor bathroom.It can't be the kind of beautiful I want it to be, Hil, until you let it mean something in your heart. It can't be restored to you if you keep it. I stop crying.Let Me have this story. I don't want to give it back, and my version is safer, steered clear of it meaning something. Of it hurting. Of it aching, and healing.Let Me have it. The rest of eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and counting, I watched Him make more of this story - more healing, more peace, more delight, more laughter - maybe even something like wisdom.It began that first night. It began with the thing that wasn't a thing, that became an entirely different and more beautiful thing. I gave Him back the story.Love,hilary

dear hilary: pull up a chair

Dear Hilary,I'm not a loud person. I don't write op-eds or shout my thoughts during class. I don't feel like I fit - I'm afraid to say something because, I might be wrong. But I admire people who give their opinion. Who have thoughts and opinions on things like infant baptism and an ideology that lines up with Hegel or Gadamer or St. Thomas Aquinas. But I don't have something neat and I'm not confident my opinions are right. Where is there a table for me?Sincerely,Too QuietDear Quiet,When I lived on Capitol Hill I went to a Baptist church on Sunday mornings. It was a ten minute walk, easy to get to, and every Sunday they served free lunch to the starving intern and college student populations that flock to the city in search of a place at a table. They would pile lasagnas or pieces of chicken or ham sandwiches, and once I think I saw pizzas, their white boxes stacked unevenly in the serving window. At those lunches there was a table of excited students - some from my program, some from schools in the city, a few post-college interns - always talking and laughing, gesticulating wildly with whatever was on their fork. I would creep down the hall towards the room after standing too long by myself in the "book sale" section of the church next to books about the loneliness of single life and searching in vain for the remarkably good looking man who had once talked to me as we both walked out of the metro at Union Station.But I never sat at the table. I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a piece of celery once, standing in the back, and I think my roommate once insisted that we at least eat some bread and spaghetti. I still hovered anywhere but that table of smiling, confident people talking loudly about their view of resurrection and grace and the "political game." I assumed that their table was for the people who knew where they stood and who they were. Who had it sorted out. Who had opinions. Who didn't stand too long next to books on singleness waiting for the mystery man from the metro.I wish I had asked your question out loud, by sitting down next to one of them.The thing about tables is that they're these places of invitation and acceptance, a give and take between each person there, across the plastic blue tablecloth or the fine linen, three chairs apart or bumping elbows. The table in the Baptist church might not have seen or recognized me - but I don't think I made myself all that visible. It felt at the time that I wasn't qualified, wasn't a part of the crowd, but I think the harder, quieter truth is that I wasn't really listening for their invitation. And I didn't trust that there was something I was going to offer simply by my presence, elbow against elbow, passing the extra napkins or the brownies or the salt.Where is there a table for you? You are needed and welcomed in surprising places.You can't be everywhere, sweet pea, and perhaps you cannot have dinner at every table you encounter. But you can, when you come across people who make you think, who you admire, who cherish good words and ideas - you can pull up a chair.It will not always work. I'm scared to give you this advice because there are moments when the grace runs dry and the harshness runs wild, and you aren't invited to draw nearer. I'm sorry in advance for those moments.But I am on the side of trusting that you bringing yourself, even without your loud and confident opinions is something wondrous. I am on the side of thinking it is worth it to pull up the chair, to believe you have something to bring with you, because you are.I am on the side of believing that tables are the beginnings of the truly beautiful between people.There is a table, many, in fact, for you in this world. Somewhere, there is a beautiful waiting to begin.Love,hilary

in the church parking lot

"They don't tell you that being brave also means hurt." God and I are back in my car on a Sunday morning. It's before anything has happened in the day, but I'm dreading going in. "I don't want to talk to you. Just so you know."We sit in silence, and I imagine He is waiting next to me. He isn't impatient but we both know the clock moves its way forward and that soon, I have to hold sticky hands and smile."I don't want to talk to you," I begin again, but God is a bit too gentle this morning for me to keep my posture. "How could you do this to me? After all of it? How could you ask me to give that up? How could you ask so much of me all the time? It's too hard. I can't. And I know you say you're Alpha and Omega, that in you my heart is safe and all of that. But where have you taken me?"God frightens me out of talking. The silence in the car is so absolute I might have stopped breathing. My heartbeat has quieted to a dim metronome. The cars on the highway don't notice, but I wonder if the trees in front of me have softened their blossoming, just for a moment, to eavesdrop."I told you it would be costly, Hilary Joan." That voice. Always, that voice.I turn in my seat, knock my glasses off and begin to wail."But where are we? Where am I?"As if knowing that God and I have gone up to a mountaintop to look out over my life wasn't clear enough, he offers me the metaphor. I type this and the silence deafen."Hilary?"I keep typing, deciding that I will make this blog post about being brave and how it hurts, that I will make it about what I am doing, learning, how I have grown the wings and can fly now. I turn the radio on, and the sun creeps through the windows."Hilary."I pause in my typing, close my eyes."Remain in my love."I keep my eyes closed. The light tickles my eyelids and the birds have taken up a chorus about the coming morning.But nothing more comes. The voice is gone.remain in my love.I sit still.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the leap

Dear Hilary,I have loved the same boy for most of my life. We've been dating now for two months, and he's crazy about me and I can tell, but he's reluctant to get more serious in case there's somebody else who is "The One" for me down the road. I don't think there will be, but I don't know how to tell him so he'll believe me. I think this might be a forever kind of love. But when do we know for sure? When does it just become time to take the leap?Love,Cliff-DwellerDear Cliff-Dweller,When I was 17, the movie Enchanted came to the big screen. A sweet movie, one that cleverly and wonderfully plays with other Disney stories, a redheaded heroine, the city of New York... I loved it.At the very end of the movie Carrie Underwood sings this song, "Ever After." I used to imagine (I'll admit it, because this is a place to be real) that I was Carrie Underwood singing that song. I used to imagine that "The One" would sweep into my life and play opposite me in a slightly-more-but-not-that-much-more-realistic version of Enchanted. Haven't we all done that, somehow? We wait for the sign. We wait for the marvelous, the extravagant, the moment when there is nothing for it but to burst into song in the middle of a crowded street and hand out roses. We all want a One, and we all want to know for sure. We think that finding "the one" will give us the permission to be extravagant with our love. To proclaim and sing it, Carrie-style.But I wonder if we, in our waiting for the big sign, we end up more afraid than we should be. What if that wasn't the sign? we ask ourselves driving along country roads. Or what if there is someone else, in a different state/country/zip code, in a different college, with a different life story... we write in our journals. I wonder if he or she is really everything I think I want. I wonder if I should be as committed to this as I want to be... I wonder, I wonder. We could wonder ourselves to death waiting for someone to come in with a pot and a wooden spoon, clanging away, "The one is approximately 2.4 miles and 3 months away!"If you want to know anything, you have to leap.You've entrusted a big thing to me - this question about love - and I don't take it lightly. I don't think we are meant to be thoughtless or hasty before we leap. I don't want to tell you or your boyfriend to do that. Ask each other hard questions. Ponder together what this thing is between you, and what you think it might or could become. Fight, and laugh, and even spend some time worry and pleading and joking and explaining and listening... and a million verbs.All the million verbs point to the bigger point, though: live it. That's what the leap is about. You won't know before you go whether this is "the one." You won't know what kind of gift you are to each other. You won't know if it is a forever kind of love. I can't promise you that.But I can promise you that when it comes to love, the only learning is in living. I can promise you that if you leap, whether you are a forever love or a season of love, whatever the nature and shape of your story, it will be lived. We can wonder alone in a dark room with the "Enchanted" soundtrack playing, asking for the sign that will make us sure that we are right about who this person is and what they are meant to be. And I think there is a special kind of love I have for those days, in all of our stories.But I wish the fullness of leaping for the two of you. I wish the hearts that you'll help expand in each other. I wish the bigger story, the one of unknowns and discoveries and all those million lived verbs.There is a glorious kind of life in the leap together - wherever you land.Love,hilary

to boston, with love (with lisa-jo)

Lisa-Jo and I are Boston girls.We are deep in the love of this city. Our selves and our hearts are wrapped up in it, in all the old names and bricks and places.So when we heard about the bombs, we wrote out our love in a letter.Read with us? Pray with us?Dear Boston,Hilary and I have loved you a long time. We attended the same college on your North shore. Fourteen years apart. Her father was my favorite professor. And then one day when we’d all grown up my husband was one of hers. So when we heard the blood spattered news today, so many memories rose up between us. Like a too-small band-aid, like an anthem, like a prayer, like a plea to unsee this new one.Keep reading at Lisa-Jo's?Love,hilary

to save you

It is too dark for me when I walk inside. I immediately regret that I have come into this stillness, my skirt with its ripped silk lining announcing my arrival with a soft rustle. I can't see who is in front or behind me. The twelve candles, the twelve flickering, bright disciple-symbols dance and snap to my right. I sink into the hard wood of the pew and wish I was driving home singing to country music.It is too quiet for me. I can hear every distracting thought rumbling towards my mind - that there is so much work to do when I get home, not enough time, that I've eaten not enough or too much, that this or that difficult question has been raised in a conversation with a friend. I shuffle my feet, feel my fingers clutching at the rim of the pew in front of me. The wood is worn smooth from the sweat of prayer and impatience; and I wonder how many hands before me have regretted coming heree, this place where a Spirit hovers over us, protecting, keeping watch.Tenebrae means darkening shadows, I read, and this service is about the disappearance of the light.I'm more afraid than I have been in a long time. We stand, think the Lord's Prayer in silence. I can feel myself close my ribcage, catching my breath over, and over. Tonight, One who was obedient goes up to be offered for me, the disobedient, and I am afraid. I am afraid of Him.The cantors begin. The notes are not sweet but searing. They land, each one, it seems, closer and closer to my pew. Their voices lament with Jeremiah and I try not to listen, but in the silence nothing else can be heard except these words - O Lord, nothing but these words -"You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you."Candle after candle is snuffed out. Light after light disappears from the altar, and still it is darker, and still, my soul clings to the idea that perhaps I am not one of these twelve bright, brief flames. Perhaps I am faithful to Him, perhaps I know better, perhaps, perhaps..."You will flee, Hilary."The Spirit whispers. A rib seems to snap, a fleeting, sharp pain in the middle of my chest. No, Lord. It couldn't be. More candles go out.And Jesus says again: "You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you."We stand. My heart pounds in my chest, and I am on the run from that voice - I am fleeing from the truth that I have been the first to flee from Him - but there is nowhere to go. Where can I go?They hide the Christ candle. The sanctuary is finally, utterly dark. Tenebrae means darkening shadows.A gun sounds behind the altar. A symbol, I know, of earth and heaven torn apart by this death, but I stop breathing and begin to cry.I sob through the silence. I sob through the slow return of the One candle. I sob and sob, tears in my hair and fogging up my glasses and I am breaking apart, because the same voice that said, "You will flee, Hilary," has just whispered,"And so, Hilary, I will tear earth and heaven apart to save you."A gun sounds, the Christ candle returns. A gun sounds, I sob and sob and sob, for my flight, for His salvation. I whisper back to Him - O Lord, I need saving. He tears heaven and earth apart to save us.To save me.I leave the church still in tears.Love,hilary

i am reminded about light

A photographer will tell you (probably) - it's about light. At the end and beginning, in the dusky red and the early white, in the grey from cloud cover and the blue off the harbor. Good pictures are about light.And not just about sun.They're also about our light. The kind that glows, that sings out, that is finally, fully, un-self-conscious because your self is a self you wrap up in love. The kind that promises to remind you. The kind of light that begins when you decide to twirl in a full yellow skirt and pirouette while staring at the afternoon reflected in the deep, glowing blue of the harbor. The kind that makes you laugh.I told you a while back that this is a year about light. And then, I must have said this a thousand times, that God turned off the lights. I'm fumbling blind, squinting into the miles of Sunday running prayer for a way forward. And He calmly keeps His hand on the light switch.But when I drove to Rockport on Saturday, when I flung out my real prayer - God, can I please feel beautiful today? - and worried it was selfish and unfair, and worried still that to say less was to lie, and then.God gifted light:

God said, light, dear one?

light?

And, somehow, between the green tea, the laughter, the not quite yet spring sun, 

where my winged prayer met my winged heart,

Right there, in the midst of it:

I could see.

Love,hilary

(Photos by Bob Delaney of Rockport)

dear hilary: this is called delight

Dear Hilary,So I'm reading the chapter "Artists, Mystics, and Clowns" in Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust and wondering: why do we act the way that we do, and how does this reflect God? What's so great about efficiency? Gravitas? Breast-beating? Sobriety? Somewhere along the line I leaned that these were more holy than extravagance, art, and levity. Somewhere alone the line I learned I must stifle effulgent passions, had no time for interruptions, mustn't laugh when there's so much suffering in the world and so much work to be done, must put away childish playfulness. Somewhere along the line I learned that God is begrudging and exasperated. What is God's disposition, anyways?Sincerely,Can't-Lighten-Up Dear Can't-Lighten-Up,In my high school, French was the only foreign language offered. We learned it playing "Tour du Monde" with vocabulary, drawing pictures of "fromage" and "papillon" for each other on the chalkboards in the House, wandering the streets of Angers and Paris and Aix ordering our first café au lait and pain au chocolat in giddy tones. I remember vividly one day after we had gotten out of class, I walked around the corner with my friend and we ducked our heads inside a patisserie, and we ordered in a rush two "religeuses." The woman behind the counter didn't look at my ratty hair in its pigtail braids and my very American purple winter coat (a hand-me-down from my sister, I think) and make a noise that meant, "American." She simply smiled and put the pastry in a small bag with a piece of tissue paper. "Bonne soirée" she called out after us. And I felt the rush of what the French call "joie" - joy.I was a junior the year that we sang Gabriel Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine." We used to rehearse the song in its delicate French in a crowded room with uneven and overly polished floorboards. I sat in a grey folding chair, tucked my feet under me, pushed that still-ratty hair behind my ears with my fingernails coated with blue sparkle. The song hushes in its final line to this - "Et de tes dons qu'il retourne comblé." And may our praises return filled with Your gifts. It isn't the exact translation - I'm not even sure I could translate it well, if I'm honest - but the last, hushed line, has the word, "comblé" which, whether or not I understood the line right, is a French word for "overjoyed." The verb "combler" is about filling, being filled.I tell you these stories because you are asking something about who God is, and what His attitude is about us. And I learned this from singing "Cantique de Jean Racine," from the woman in the patisserie by the Lycée David d'Angers, from my years of unkempt hair and hand-me-down winter coats: God is delighted.Delighted, overjoyed - we so often mistake those words for happy, or, more honestly, for naively cheerful or optimistic. We think that if we name those adjectives, we're making it sound like we (or God or both) aren't taking hurt seriously. That we have missed suffering. That we have lost sight of the ache of the world and are applying a pink band-aid to the gaping wounds.But it is the work of delight and joy to come close to suffering, even closer than the so-called serious realism. It is through joy, not cynicism, that we approach the unspeakably difficult.Because joy and delight are not happy feelings: they are the choices to let love win. They are the choice to trust love triumphant. Joy is a choice to believe God when He calls what He has made very good, and a choice to draw near to that very good world in its ache and terror and sadness.If you do not practice laughter, you cannot know this joy. If you do not practice the playfulness, the levity, the extravagant gestures without reason, the shrieks of hide-and-seek games, you cannot walk with us to the places where love is most needed and most difficult.God is overjoyed with us. God is delighted. Because He is these things, because He is delighted in my moment in the patisserie, eating something truly good and laughing with my friend, and wishing the woman kneading bread a "bonne soirée" - He can enact such an extravagant and mysterious story of love triumphant. Because God is delighted, because His delight is not some blithe or silly perpetual good mood, but the serious weight of everlasting love, He is able to save us.This is the story we are going to tell the world. The story of love triumphant over darkness. The story of joy and reuniting, of harmony and whole, of laughter and extravagance. But to tell it, and to tell it in the places most needed, we must practice those things in ourselves.So, dear one, this is the work of delight. It will take everything you've got, to live the blurred lines between sorrow and weeping and joy and splitting your sides laughing. It will take your whole self and a self transformed to banish the categories we've so carefully constructed around what counts as "serious" and what counts as "light," to sing while we cry and rage while we laugh.But I think it can be done. I think it must be done. So that, in the mystery of love triumphant, we can sing:Répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante;Que tout l'enfer fuie au son de ta voix;Pour on us the fire of your powerful grace, O Lord,That all hell flees at the sound of Your voice.Love,hilary

to the musicians

Dear musicians,You wrote this.And this.And still, then, this.You see, you have made more than music. You have put words in front of me, sounds in front of me, that I turn to when no words seem sufficient. When all has been said, or felt for so long it may as well have been said.I turn to you, Explosions in the Sky, because you are signaling something more than I cannot understand but I wonder, fear. I turn to you when I'm wearing black running shorts too big for me, lying on my bed with my eyes closed in the face of making some real mistakes with myself, the kind that put you on your bed late on a Sunday as the sun bleeds pink into your room and you cry, not the tears of guilt anymore, but of simpler exhaustion. I play you because I don't know what else to do.But somehow you are the answer.I turn to you, Horse Feathers, for the violin. For the song of the year, for everything you realize as you sing that it feels like you are just beginning to learn. I can hear you echo when the last train pulls out of the station late on a Friday night, and it's as if the stars themselves caught wind of the Last Waltz and played it back to me, looked down in something like pity or compassion, something like grace or peace or understanding or tenderness, and whisper your music. I listen for you in the night sky.And somehow the violin plays.I turn to you, The Civil Wars, because when I watch you singing "Poison and Wine" I think of the day when I am telling my daughter the hard stories about love and I imagine that we'll sit on a park bench and I'll play the song, and whisper in her ear that all of this hard is also all that is becoming beautiful, the bass notes to accompany the sweetness of the guitar. I imagine as the song plays, each of us with one earphone, our heads together, that I will tell her that in love aching is a part of the whole, a thing not to be shunned but accepted, embraced. I hold her imaginary self in my heart with you playing in the background.Somehow this teaches me.I turn to you, Bon Iver - I turn to Holocene, strangely, to give me my heartbeat back. Because there are the days when I catch my breath at the clarity of the truth, the invitation to do a difficult thing. I turn to Holocene to listen for my closest friends. I turn to Holocene in the middle of the work day when I imagine writing a poem with a line about peeling potatoes, something so ordinary it ought to become beautiful to us, or as I make the same right turn out of the school driveway to go home, or when I sit in astonishment at the words of the Collect in a Sunday liturgy. I turn to Holocene to write and reimagine. I turn to Holocene to allow my heart to beat, even for a moment, to a rhythm I feel inside my bones.Somehow you play me back to myself.So, musicians, you who struggle for 10,000 hours, who light candles with your sounds and silences, who make a way for the tongue-tied and trembling, who build songs that carry us forward even as we fight, who play the world, and are played by it -who, somehow, create out of nothing, something -I am so grateful. I am so blessed. I am, entirely, awed. Love,hilary

burst with joy

I got a phone call yesterday - a rush of California wind in the background, a rush of shouting and laughter and I caught a few tears, too.They told me in hurried voices that they were engaged, that on Saturday something marvelous and beautiful had just come true and they couldn't hardly believe it, but it was real, and they loved each other and couldn't wait to celebrate and could I mark off space in the calendar for a big celebration soon? And in a rush of California wind blown through my grey New England heart, I heard real joy.It sounds like two people who have set out on a long road holding hands against the challenge and leaning into the blessing.It sounds like her red dress in the vineyard, his hand fingering the ring in his pocket. It sounds like their smiles, saved only for each other, saved only for this day.It sounds like the way that I know they'll carry each other, through long mornings and church services and drives with coffee in travel mugs, in being apart only to be drawn closer together, in the best kind of yearning and yielding, independence and oneness. It sounds like the way that she and I drove along the highway back once from dinner with a friend, and the headlights trickled past us as we went north, and I told her that they have it. Whatever it was, and is, and will become.So these people whom I love are engaged, and in their hurried phone call on Sunday, they offered an invitation: to be part of their joy. To burst with it just as they are bursting with it. To make my own heart glad for the Saturday afternoon in the vineyard and the word "yes" and the question that preceded it.And even though I don't always know how, I want to burst with joy for them. Even though their story meets mine in a different in-between, in the midst of my own questions and worries and late-night lying in bed awake so confused that I just put a song on my iPhone and play it through the tiny speakers to the ceiling?Even though I don't know a thousand things about love?I still want to burst with their joy. The Kingdom is built on our hearts being grateful for all the blessing we hear rushing past us, no matter when or how or to whom. The Kingdom is built on bursting with joy because two people are going to become one.Jesus said, Remain in my loveJesus said, Love one another as I have loved you. As branches of the same Vine, we remain in His love. And with His love, we burst with joy.Because two will soon become one, because love is brave and persists and says yes, because blessings come on Saturday afternoons in vineyards, because there is nothing for it but to smile and screech with joy that this good thing has come to be.Love,hilary

dear man on the metro

Dear man on the Metro in DC last weekend,I noticed you because of the suit. It was a dangerously well cut suit. And I think you knew it from the way you held yourself, standing up against the rumbling of the car, against the forces and the inertia pulling against the rest of us with our tired arms and suitcases wedged between our knees.I saw you and you saw me. We made the awkward kind of eye contact that you make when you've noticed someone because of their dangerously well cut suit or their unique red-gold hair. We looked away again. We looked back, and then away, and then you leaned in to the very lovely woman sitting to your left and whispered something to her.We didn't make eye contact after that - you made the gesture, the signal, that though perhaps you and I had acknowledged our striking selves, you were with the effortlessly lovely woman to your left.Thank you. Thank you for smiling at her so completely, for your well-polished shoes pointed in her direction. Thank you for laughing just loud enough to tell us that the thing she had said was sweet and you enjoyed it. Thank you for holding her hand oh-so-briefly as we pulled away from Dupont Circle.You see, sir, when I noticed that suit on a Sunday morning on the red line of the metro in my favorite city, when I was lost in the frustration that I was not that lovely woman on your left, my imagination ran away from me. I thought, hey, that guy just looked at me. And a second look, too. I wonder whether he is getting off at Metro Center, or if we're both headed to the airport, and maybe he's headed back... You know what I mean. I thought all the thoughts that a twenty-something in a metro car thinks when she's faced with a second look and her heart is already three months past drained of emotional confidence.But you didn't look again. You instead offered the woman you were with another gesture of your care for her. You told us that there was a story between the two of you, somewhere between her hand in its dark grey glove, and your aviators dangling out of your pocket. Something is alive, you were telling us, and it belongs to the two of you, and whether a girl with curly red-gold hair wonders if you're headed to the airport, or not, whether you are wearing a dangerously well cut suit, or not, you are wholeheartedly somewhere else.Thank you for loving the lovely woman on your left in just the way we all ought to love those people in our lives. Sometimes I think the biggest lessons in love I could learn riding a metro and watching the people who ride it next to me. Because in all the gestures you probably don't even remember making, you wrote your love. You wrote a note to us - as if on a napkin at a restaurant or on the back of an extra customs declaration form just before landing - and that this person, next to you, she was particular and compelling and you were in it.I don't know, sir, stranger, where you fall in the midst of your story with her. I don't know if you two are the novel, or the short story, or even the haiku of love. I don't know if I will see you riding the metro again, someday when we're both in DC again and you will be with her, or someone else, or no one.But I don't need to know the ending of the whole story to appreciate the sentence you just wrote. I just wanted to thank you, that in a moment when I could have sat back on the ugly orange seats, and run away in my imagination with who you could have been, instead, you offered me a glimpse at the kind of real intimacy I hope I someday have.You gave me - and all of us sitting in that metro car on our way to Metro Center or the airport or Arlington National Cemetery - a reminder that love in its best and brightest is often (and maybe always) the simplicity of drawing the other person near to you. Love, real love, is you on the metro not looking back at anyone, but only leaning in closer to her.Thank you, sir, for not looking back.Love,hilary