I pray with the animals

I'm at a loss for the words this early in the morning, sitting as I am at the gate waiting for a plane to bring me home and away. Those lines have blurred, God, I think half-heartedly, and I am impatient for the days when it is no longer the slow waltz of leaving and arriving, the dance outside terminals and in airport parking lots and along the back roads of Newburyport and The Woodlands. I am impatient for the hands clasped, for the dishes drying in my hands and the soft hum as we waltz through the night laced in each other's arms. Impatient, I grip the pen tighter, ask for the right words, ask for the prayer. But I don't know how to put this in words flung up to God this morning as August begins, and my words flee from me the moment I lower my eyelids in the ordinary, obedient way. The fear of leaving, the joy of arriving, they crowd in and I hesitate.I remember that I brought the book with me at just this moment - a ghost of a whisper to remember that Carmen Bernos de Gasztold offered prayers, those of the lark and the bee and the old, tired camel. I crack the spine slightly in my haste, smooth the pages with my fingertips. The flight attendants call those who need to board with small children - but aren't I just such a child? - and I read. The Prayer of the FoalO God! the grass is so young!My hooves are full of capers.Thenwhy does this terror start up in me?I raceand my mane catches the wind.I raceand Your scents beat on my heart.I race,falling over my own feet in my joy,because my eyes are too bigand I am their prisoner:eyes too quick to seizeon the uneasiness that runs through the whole world.Dear God,when the strange nightprowls round the edge of day,let Yourself be moved by my plaintive whinny;set a star to watch over meand hush my fear.Amen.--I was only seven or eight when I first wanted a horse. My grandfather in England gave me The Very Best Book of Horses and I read it so much my fingers smudged the ink of the headings, wore the pictures to almost nothing with my fingers tracing the outline of the girls in their riding outfits and English saddles. I met a pony once in a field in England, an old white one with grey spots scattered on her body, more from age than a dappled beginning. I fed her sweet grass slowly from the palm of my hand, and just once, Dad let me touch her nose. I startled as I felt her breathe, my hand calmed by her slowness, my heart hushed by her deep eyes.--When I was trying to explain my fear to her in the dark of the upstairs in the student center, on the chairs we always sat in when it was that kind of conversation, I told her I was like a horse. Steady and skittish, born at once with gravity and with wild movement. I was afraid, and eager. I felt God ripple through my heart like the zephyrs in late spring here, which trace the edge of the water, but I was scared, running for the hills, afraid of such closeness. I was always eager and afraid.--And then, that winter night I wandered through the bookcases in the attic, searching for the old story, for "If it's a colt you want, I'll give you Starlight" - for Almanzo and Eliza Jane and Royal, for the Christmas and the schoolyard and the year that Dad first read me the story out loud. I found our hardcopy sitting in between other old and musty books, remembering how I, like Almanzo, had always wanted a colt, how I had wanted a farm like his and to build a sled and train two cows, Star and Bright, and plow my way through waist-deep snow into school. I remember being lost in the story, in the somehow realness of it, just because I knew how much Almanzo had wanted a horse, for I wanted one too.--I read the prayer on the plane again and again, closing my eyes only to open them again. I remember how God cherishes the creation of the animals, how He teaches us to love them in Adam's naming. I remember how it is good to imagine the conversations they must have with God, for this whole earth is bursting with songs back to the Creator. Right before we land, I write:Dear Lord, may I ever remember how Your creatures, wild and tamed, young and old, yield their life as praise of their being, of Your creating. May I give the same praise lark-like and with the canter of the horse, for all that You give. For Yours is the world. And Yours the glory. Amen. Love,hilary

the words of living water

My knees  knock together when I step out of the pew and walk forward. I've read in church before, but I clutch the printout tightly, creasing it in my hands before I bow at the altar, in the way I've been trying to show the youngest among us, - we bow because this is a holy place - and I step up to the lectern."A reading from the Book of Genesis, chapter 18." This is the story of Abraham, who dares to stand before the Lord Almighty, who speaks - Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? - and whom God answers - if I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. This is the story of Abraham, who dares again and again to stand and draw near, and whom God answers, again and again revealing His justice, so wildly compassionate - that even for the sake of forty-five, of forty, thirty, twenty, ten, He will not destroy it. --It is Fr. Patrick's ordination to the priesthood in Boston - I'm not quite a teenager, I think, but he has asked me to read the Old Testament lesson, to speak it out into the crowds gathered in clean whites and blues. I'm scared to move in the space, because the holiness of the incense and the quiet as we wait for the processional is too much for my still-young heart. I'm scared to read, scared to hear my voice carrying out His message. I'm not quite a teenager, but I know I'm not a vessel worthy of this Word."A reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 6." I take deep breaths, and I close my eyes. Dad taught me to speak in church, slow, looking out over the lectern into the faces of those who receive these words, because these are the people hungry for the Word. This is the vision where the seraphim call to one another - holy, holy, holy is the Lord  of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory!  - and as I peer out, my hands white at the knuckles against the sides of the carefully carved lectern, I see that I am not alone in the rapture of this moment, not alone, after all, because we all together must be whispering what I say next - I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!. And then, just as I realize that I am not alone - Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, Behold,  this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for." I tell out that promise to the crowds of faces, these words that we too, who are a people of unclean lips, we too can be touched.--I wear the dress on purpose in case he'd be there - one shoulder, black, and I wear the leopard printed flats that I always think make my feet look smaller, more delicate. I straightened my hair and circled eyeshadow across my eyelids in my parent's mirror.  I'm reading the Fourth Lesson tonight, and I pray suddenly, in my pew, that somehow, the words will sound new to me, too."The peace that Christ will bring is foreshown." I close my eyes. When I open them again, I hear a voice, which must be mine, but it's stronger and it's richer and it is saying words of living water. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. I forget the boy I dressed for, though I see him in the back of the church, though our eyes pass each other, because when I hear that voice, which must be mine, reading these, the better words of living water, I am returned back into the mystery of these words who bear to us the Word, this mystery that by our sounding out the words to each other -we meet the Lord, the King, the Judge of all the Earth who does what is just, the shoot from the stump of Jesse whose delight is in the fear of the Lord.--I still knock my knees together every time I walk up the aisle to read. I still feel the twelve year old worried that everyone will see that I am still too young to stand before the congregation. I still take deep breaths to steady myself -and ever, always, I drink the living water of the Word.Love,hilary

the greater work, 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 Girland 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,

She asked me while the rest of the congregation was singing the third verse of the hymn, which I can't remember in this moment, why I was so nice. She smiled up at me as she said it, flung her arms around my neck and hugged me as if she might never see me again. Her hair was in two braids, which she proudly swung from side to side to show me - "do you like my braids? Mommy did them!" And I held her close, feeling the small weight that is somehow cosmic, that in this small person there are more wonders than in all the world, because she is fearfully made, because she is. That wonder of being - that you talk about in your letter, that simple and terrifying complicated wonder of being. She is, and as I hold her, and she says, in her outdoor voice, "I love you so much!" I close my eyes.

But before I really pray, before I really get to the moment of something deep and beautiful whispered over her, before any of that, she crawls off my lap and runs back to her pew, flings her arms around her brother and waves to me, before they both take each other's hands and go to Sunday School.

I think that's the way of the world, Preston, the way that I have trouble with - that what we cherish we must somehow release.

I got to hold her for a few minutes, but as she wriggled free and tumbled off my lap and ran back to her family, her lavender dress billowing from the fan and the wind that always moves through the sanctuary, I remembered that the act of holding is, must be, an act of release.

I want to hold onto her forever. I want to hold onto people and places, hold the whole wide world in my hands (I played that for you on the backroads, your hand in mine). I used to think that was the great work: to hold fast, to hold people secure in your heart and your arms and your thoughts about them. I used to think it was the great work to stay close with your arms encircled and your eyes closed, praying over the little girl while she nestled against you.

But the truth is the greater work is to hold one another, hold this world that we want, as you say, through the threaded grace of wanting it because of God, who is the first mover and the first lover of the world - hold all that, and then release it.

And I think about the Cross, how those arms outstretched are at the same moment holding us close to the heart of a God who is too terrifying to be understood, and releasing us into the water that flows from the right side of the temple, releasing us into the life that He came to give fully, releasing us from the embrace of the world into the embrace of God. Offering and release. They're connected, I think.

If we close our selves, even around the things we love most, arms encircled around the little girl and her braids or around the best friend or around even the moments of walking through fields of shocking red and purple in Southern France -

if we hold them too closely, we cannot make the gesture of offering. Our bodies which mirror our hearts cannot do the greater work: the work of loving so fiercely and so wildly that we do, in fact, release our hold on that which we love - 

if we hold them too closely, we lose the moment to see them as gift, to offer back praise to the Giver - 

if we hold them too closely, we miss the greater work of love. 

Love, always, 
hilary

praise is calling, 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. This is the first of the new letters - but you can read Preston's last one, from last October, here. (And just so you know, he is unlike anyone I have met before. In all those amazing ways that words fail to capture. I'm amazed and awed and all the rest by him)Dear Preston,"You know what I think? I think maybe I'm finding it. You know, the THING." I cradle the phone lovingly, just the way I used to when she and I would talk the miles between New York and Massachusetts in our college years. I remember how we didn't know who we even might want to begin to be, how then, everything was new and she taught me to joy in that, rather than to fear. I remember how the not knowing used to send me running for some comfort somewhere, for books or academic sounding research projects, but she said I had a calling different than that - something about writing, about telling stories."I think I'm finding it."Do you remember me telling you about this conversation? Did I tell you about it? Sometimes, I think you and I have talked about everything, but I'm back to wondering if I can put words to what is going on in my heart and mind. I'm thinking about this again, this morning, in the long stretch of the day and the longer stretch of the summer, thinking about calling, thinking about what I'm hungry for.We use the word vocation all the time. Is it because we almost never know the real word? What do you call it - the hunger that somehow feeds you? What do you call it - the thing you must do, as dear Rilke would say, the thing that calls forth from inside you and outside you and that will not relent? What do you call it - the way of being?What I'm after, anyway, is a way of being. What I am longing for, anyway, is to wander without being lost, to ramble with a pattern, to... something. I can't quite figure out what.The words trip their way out of my mouth, always a little ahead of my thoughts - "I'm called to praise."But we all are, aren't we?What would be special or different about that calling?Doesn't God have a more unique purpose than that? (the questions begin, a slight trembling of my bright horizon line, and I blink a few times as I continue to pace the pathways of the old, familiar campus)We live in a difficult time to talk about calling  - the emphasis has landed so heavily on our uniqueness, on our gifting, on how God has specifically called each of us to each particular, discreet, place and time and conversation, that we have forgotten how much of our calling is universal, even, dare I name it, ordinary. We spend time seeking the very thing only we can do, imagining that calling must be there, where deep gladness and deep hunger meet (I kept the napkin with that Buechner quote from a three years ago) but also where they meet and I am unique there, a pioneer."I'm called to praise."That's what I can't shake off. I think about the way that words can sing out from one person to another, can Name (you know, like Meg?) things as real, can breathe love. I think about how maybe my life can be flamed with praise. How maybe I can sing in the kitchen to children in the future that we should praise the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation. I think about the world, lit by praise, the hard work of perceiving what is true so that it can be mirrored and imagined and understood.I don't know what it holds, exactly, but you know me with things like this - I just can't get over it. The calling to praise. Perhaps now I am just to listen closer. To the world, to people - and maybe listening is where we can begin.Love, always,hilary

the wondrous offering, a letter to preston

Dear Preston,I know, we sort of stopped doing these letters for a season, and I know that we'll talk about this, on Skype or when you are here, in my kitchen, in not so many days, but we made these letters to write our way towards the true and the beautiful. And when I saw something in church today, I wanted to tell you. I wanted to write it here, first, in this our place of beginning.Behind our altar there is an icon of the crucified Christ. I see it every week, I'm almost blind to his face, until that moment I get on my knees and I'm asking for the Body, and for the Blood, asking Christ to enter me, asking Him to be with me in the deepest mystery. Then, I look at that icon and it is like the Orthodox say - it is a window. I feel the air move differently, a wind coming from the icon, from the altar, from the outstretched arms of that crucified Savior. I feel the air touch me as the priest's robes swing by, the steady gesture of offering.Today I saw something else, too. This is what I have to tell you, the moment that stopped me.Today, I watched as the priest made the gesture of offering during the Memorial Acclamation - the final doxology where we pray, my eyes leaking a few stray tears at the steadfastness of this faith in the face of my own wavering heart, this Church who breaks and breaks and by breaking keeps us whole...

 "By him, andwith him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honorand glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever."

And the priest lifts the bread and wine above, and in this gesture upwards, I realized: the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ icon are still visible. You can see Him pinned to the cross behind the priest praying that this mystery would take place in the unity of His spirit. You can see, not his face, but his arms, stretched in offering, in love. I have never known if I can possibly understand the Cross - and the questions swirl and dip in my stomach some days - is this penal substitutionary atonement or the Moltmann suffering Christ or the cosmic redemption - (and you know how much I trip over theology)but Preston? The outstretched arms are visible behind our offering. What does that tell us? What does it promise? I don't know. But I know my heart has been stopped, that I can go no further, and though the words are tentative and tremulous I know I have seen something wondrous this morning and I wanted to tell you, I had to tell you.Is it that Christ, to whom we offer, is visible because we are offering what already is His? We are making our offering in response to the offering already made, our sacrifice a poor remembering and reechoing through the world that we know who has stretched His arms out, once for all, and every moment? Can we see and hear the air change and move as we gesture upwards, and just behind the gesture, is the Person to whom we make the offering, who was Himself first offered?Do you remember the scene in Gilead, the one with the baby and the girl, the leaf and the river? When they go back to the car, it says, "Glory said, 'I do not understand one thing in this world. Not one.'" That is how it feels now. I have seen something wondrous like the child and her mother kneeling in the cool clear of a stream and learning the world by sight and touch, and I do not understand one thing about it.Christ's arms behind our offering. Christ to whom we make the offering. Christ, invisible yet poured out in the mystery of remembering Him. Today I realized that I have sold the idea of this Eucharist is memorial so desperately short. I have thought that was not the fullest way to imagine it, not when there are mysteries of presence and participation.But we must not make light of the remembering. Christ commanded a memorial. In remembrance of Him - almost as if He commanded that we see His arms behind each gesture of offering. That when we get on our knees to receive, we come into the memory of Jesus outstretched, offering Himself for us.I do not understand one thing about this world. I do not understand one thing, but I wonder at each thing, holding onto it like the child with the leaf. And perhaps it is enough to know that the offering is wondrous, and beautiful, and fearsome to behold.Love, from my heart which is wondering,hilary

Daddy, where are you?

Daddy.I never call Him that. If we're frank, I don't know how to refer to the Almighty the way I whine to my own father in the early morning light of a cold February. I prefer the prayers well worded and quick. I prefer the deep rhythms of a church reciting together, high and low pitched voices in a strange kind of harmony. I like to imagine that when I stammer my way through grace, I sound something like the holier ones who have come before.I know they tell us that Jesus called Him Abba - and that's an equivalent, in the space of translation, to Daddy.I never really thought we'd be allowed that kind of endearment with God. When I pray, I can't imagine that God responds to that, that shouldn't I pray something pretty? Shouldn't I show God that I'm not wasting my love of words - that I'm putting them in the right order and they say such pretty things?I called him Daddy twice in the last two days.I didn't say it in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek or some other language that makes it sound somehow more authentic or graceful or the way that I imagine we approach the altar and the throne of the Lamb. I blurted out the "Daddy" of my three year old days. The Daddy of goodnight hugs, two or three at a time, and surprise breakfasts at the diner for good grades and the unselfconscious airport reunions after traveling away from home in high school.The point of praying can't always be the pretty.It can't be the right theology, so carefully crafted. It can't be the deep concepts, addressing in God the question about His imminence and His transcendence and His real presence, and the hundreds of unknown dimensions of His reality. It can't be us asking beautiful, calm, composed, reasonable.Because we're a desperate people after the heart of God. And in the afternoons where it rains, and rains, and you tell God that however He does it, Jesus needs to get inside your head and do something about your selfishness, and you don't know what it is but He can just do it, whatever it is, there is something in that that gets you a little nearer to trust.All I say  is, "Daddy, where are you?"And I won't finish the sentences I imagined when I imagined praying - not of intercession or listing the people or the thanksgiving. I won't wrap the things I believe in beauty. I won't because I'll be crying too hard or laughing too hard or both. I won't because this is the whole prayer.Daddy, where are you? 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.

this is where I learn something

A day is not a long time. 24 hours, minutes ticked by in neat regular fashion, so many of them already dressed in the colors of what we must do - emails that need writing, conferences that need planning, phone calls and food and sleep and sweating to Zumba routines in your brother's bedroom so you don't break the 200 year old floorboards of your upstairs hideaway. Not every minute is extraordinary. But sometimes a stretch of unextraordinary ones, sleek and swift, upend you.I am driving back to Berlin to fly home. I start thinking about my blog. The rows of trees along the autobahn are neater than the ones at home; the fields are bright yellow with an unidentified crop. The cars blur past our windows, a sky still swollen with rain that hasn't started falling. I've been in another country; it feels like going home is to travel somewhere unfamiliar again.I'm thinking some unpretty thoughts about my blog along the German highway. I'm defensive against this nagging worry about me and writing, and something someone who really matters said to me before I left, "Are you their Holy Spirit?" And he was right - that's the question to stop me short.But the defensive thoughts have lingered across the ocean and some days of separation from the online world, my lungs full of self-righteous air, so justified in what I think I do when I write about perfectionism and being "enough" and grace.And in the way of it, as it always is when you travel, you catch the eye of the land spread out before you and something looks back at you. Maybe it is just the gentleness of the horses in their pasture, but the one who makes eye contact with me has a fierceness about her that makes me momentarily afraid. She isyoung, stamping her foot impatiently at the green earth, and she tosses her mane just as we flyby. We stare at each other a while after.God tells me often that I ought not to imagine myself so wise and knowing. But I'm 22, and I assume that I can learn it on my own and teach it twice before my time.  I place my words around me like fenceposts and bricks, laying my comfort and security in them, but the true things I say, o dear foolish heart of mine?God gives them because I need saving.Maybe the mare who looked at me could see that I confuse the two, the why I write and the who I want to be and the real way of grace.Maybe she shook her mane at me because of that.Or maybe God has been speaking to me about this for weeks and it was only her look that stopped me in my brick piling fence laying defensiveness. God has been speaking.I don't have wisdom about being a perfectionist. I write about it, here and here and all over my heart, but I don't have it. What I bring is just this: that God sometimes lets us write out what we do not really know in order for us to learn it. What I bring is me, bricks and fence posts abandoned as I walk curious toward the truth that God saves me, and the most surprising thing is that is forever a one-way street. We set tables, that person with the right questions tells me.And we bring our words not as bricks but as bread, here for the breaking open and sharing, here because we are all hungry.Back on the road in Berlin, I am now thinking about the mare in the field. About the sleek and swift moments that upend us. About how traveling, however long and far, brings us home again.Love,hilary

be, still.

Tonight I walked back to the chapel, after the black caps and gowns had paraded past, had gone out to dinner, had found their way to celebrations and shouting and the I-can't-believe-it's-here that was my own just a year ago. I walked, and walked, feeling the blisters where my shoes don't quite fit my feet, feeling the dip and pull of my shoulders after carrying the day, feeling the weight of my body pulled towards the earth.Maybe my knees knew where they wanted to go before my heart did.I sat alone in the chapel, in a back pew. I stared at the empty chairs, the empty, echoing room. There were only a few chandeliers lazy and lit, swaying almost as an afterthought of wind. We breathed, the room and I. We waited each other out. I waited, what felt like an age in the sweetly dimming sunlight, for God or maybe just for some sense of something out there, some echo of yes, we see you, from the pews and benches, from the hymnals flung in piles or the ferns beckoning me with their long green fingers.Oh, God, love is hard.It is hard to want a thing so delicate, so very unsayable, that our words gesture at it almost helplessly. It is hard to walk in a thing that I barely know. It is hard to widen my heart past the length of the day and the ache in my feet and the steady drumbeat in my left temple. I slid off my shoes - a reflex - and I folded in on myself.God, love is hard.I sat and sat and sat and sat. And nothing changed. No whisper in the breeze through the single open window. No flame of hope or joy streaming over me. No promises or reminders resounding in the empty room. I could hear the fans whir themselves to sleep. I could hear a clock keep its time. I could almost hear the slight shake in my hands against the edge of the pew in front of me. But the house of worship was quiet.I'm the girl who always wants the voice from heaven reassurance. I'm the girl who expects Him to say it loud and say it obvious, a gold star on my forehead at the end of each day, an answer when I worry. And the stillness echoed so loud I was afraid I might drown in it. Be still and know... I've never know how to do that. Be still. My mother knows how to make silence with the littlest ones on Sunday mornings. With them, she weaves stillness through their hands and toes and flailing elbows and anxious knees. The youngest learn to listen to the silence, the hollow widened space where God walks. Again, they must teach me. Again, I know so little, sitting alone in the chapel in the middle of the sunset chasing away the afternoon. I know so little about a world hollowed and lit by silence. I know so little about how God sounds; I wonder how much I have lost in not listening.But it was still in the chapel tonight.Maybe that was Him.Love,hilary

myself, fourteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only on our knees can we hear our heartbeat. 

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: why we pray

Dear Hilary,If God is other, if God is something inconceivable and beyond, why would we pray? Why should we pray? How do we even know if he hears or cares, if there is anything real about the Person you say you get on your knees in front of? I don't want to pray anymore. And why should I?Love,The ChallengerDear The Challenger,I'm torn between telling you that I believe in intercession, in prayer, in the agonizing work of getting on our knees because of something about St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, and this one man who lives in rural Mississippi who I met last year on a trip down to see my mentor - and telling you that I'm not sure I always do believe it, but I pray anyway. Both are honest, in different hours of the same day, in different seasons of the same year. And the reasons behind our prayers are mysterious, I think, and somehow beyond words, but I'll try.I pray because of things like, well, the fact that God's otherness has been brought so near to us in the image of God we bear, in how the Incarnation has flung all our ideas of "cosmic distance" out the window. I haven't ever known what to say to the red shift and the rate of expansion of galaxies, other than to ask whether the Incarnation shouldn't shatter any idea that we have about what love is, and what it contains?And when I get on my knees in my office and bend my head and close my eyes against the too-bright office light, I'm not sure I know how to believe Him against the black holes, the waves and vibrations of shadows and shuddering dimensions, the unknowns. And call me a fool, but I remember a love so particular He knows my name, cares where I work, who I befriend... a love so particular, He came to earth to save me. God is inconceivable; but it's His movement that mystifies me more than His being. The fact of them: the fact of this Redeeming, the fact of this messy, sweaty, bloodied birth and life and death; the fact of his loving, not just in the hypothetical, but in the lived. I can say, "I pray because God has commanded me to," and there is something in that all on its own.I pray because God Himself cut the covenant. God saved Israel. God wandered with His people, through the years of disobedience and the agony of distance and all in the movement towards this pivotal mystery: the Word made Flesh.And whether we want to, or not, doesn't really seem the question you're asking. I think if you waited a little longer, you might ask that question differently. I think you'd be asking whether you can trust the work of prayer. Whether it means something.And that answer is a terrifying yes.You can trust the work of prayer, of speaking words too big for your head and your heart, of interceding for a person you love.I can't pretend to really know why. My logical and theological arguments begin to fade at the moment when I face the real question - can we trust this - and I don't know how to tell you yes. But yes.God is inconceivable, beyond comprehension, the creator of the dimensions we know nothing about. And He is wondrously close to us. And His love is particular for you and me. And a love that particular is listening.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

to be saved

I am afraid of the dark after Tenebrae. I walk into the sanctuary after the sun has gone down, and I hear the shuffle of programs and the squirm of young children (was it so long ago I was one of them), as we wait for the new fire of Eastertide.The priests faces are masked in shadows. The fire leaps ahead, but it is not yet comfort, only a raw hope. I shrug off my coat and lean forward, trying to hear and see that this hope will soon be ablaze in our pews and in our hands, a live light among a hundred candles. But first, the priest must trace the sign of our victory and death's defeat, make the sign of the cross in the Paschal candle itself, so that it might be a sign to us. He must pray, dipping into the new fire for the light that will now never be extinguished:May the light of Christ, gloriously rising, dispel the darkness of heart and mind. I hear these words echo - and the shadows begin to flee. Even at these words, there is more light. The choir has lit its candles from the Paschal Candle, the acolytes - the light-bearers - are bringing into each pew a new flame that dispels the darkness. I can see people I know across the aisle; I can see my old headmaster and his wife standing near the organ. I can see and hear, feel and almost touch, the entrance of the light.When I receive my own small flame it burns so bright I can no longer be afraid. For the shadows are fleeing, even in the still-dark of our waiting, even in the not-yet of our expectation. The shadows that quickened and hid the Christ candle on Wednesday are already scattering, undone by the new light that is so gloriously rising. We are saved through nothing but the blood, Jesus said to me on Friday as I stared at the cross shrouded in black. Nothing but my blood, nothing but being entered into it and washed in it, nothing but this radical and frightening story, where I go to be offered up for you, and you see me offered up, you see and taste in the smallest of ways the grief that God pierced into Mary's heart. Nothing but you, Hil, and me, and my blood poured out. Nothing but the quickened shadows that make you afraid and my light hidden in the tomb. Nothing but your distracted mind, crying in your car over the things I have been teaching you, how hard it is to receive grace, how hard to be a receiver, and not a giver, of love.Nothing but my blood.That's what it means to be saved.And so, on the Holy Night, when I am spent with crying over my selfishness, over all everything I failed at during Lent, over the stupid blog posts and the mean words, over the ungracious dismissals and even less gracious longing?This is what it means to be saved: to hear prayer loud in the ever-lightening sanctuary: Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him, and all the ages to him be glory and power through every age forever. Amen. Nothing but his blood will save me. But Christ is the Morning Star who knows no setting. In Him we light this candle. In Him we sing the first, breathless alleluia.I stand amid the shouts of Easter praising, silent, black dress and pink cardigan smudged with all my trying and striving and failing, my feet tired in their polished shoes, hands uplifted.To be saved through His blood. To be saved through the ever-burning Light. There are no more shadows this night.I can hear Him draw near to touch my face, in the strange silence between shouting church-people and bright lights in the sanctuary and though He is not touching my face, He is. Lord? I whisper. I close my eyes and feel Him smile. You have saved me. 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

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

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

God is not an if-then God

Oh friend, listen close. I've got this story that I'm bursting to tell you.I'm bursting to tell us, because, you see... I want to tell you a story about grace. I want to tell you that "God is not an if-then blesser."I was on the phone when I heard myself say it. I was fiddling with the earrings on my mom's dresser, thinking about the way they caught the light, the way they felt like pebbles and glass in my hand, the sharp prick of the metal backing- and I said it."God is not an if then blesser."And the truth of it stared back at me- that this, this is the beautiful thing about grace in our lives. God does not ask for only the one path, the perfect walk, the right words always at the right times and the best choices and the best, well, everything. No, our God pours blessing over so much more. Over you and me in all our failing. Over the choices we regret. Over the ones we cherish.He blesses because that is who He is. Oh, friend, can I dig this deep into our skin and write it across our foreheads, and remind us when we sit in silence in the face of our choices and how much we fear they will be, not only wrong, but without blessing?God blesses because He loves us.God blesses because He calls this world good and He dwells in it and His dwelling is blessing, and the blessing is uncontainable and mysterious and more constant than you or me or what we do.This is a story about grace. This is about us coming out of the cage of perfect, of trying til we bleed to guess what He wants us to do because we are scared to lose something God is so eager to give us. He doesn't need us to try to calculate our way into His heart.He just needs us to come running, carrying our choices like pebbles in front of us, our faces alight with His light. He is a God of blessing.He is the God of grace.tell me that doesn't begin to sing a little freedom into your heart? I'm singing next to you. Love,Hilary

it is simpler than you think

That is the funny thing about the mornings you wake up in a cold sweat from the fever that broke in the watches of the night: you lie there, and it is simple. Startlingly clear on the outskirts of your mind, in that just-before-fully-waking feeling, and you remember:You remember all the nights you lay in your bed in your small cramped second floor apartment, crying into your pillow that there was no clarity, no plan, no guidance for what "after college" looked like.You remember fighting God on runs around the pond, fighting the hope and the doubt, fighting the talking about the future and the avoiding of talking about it, and how the sunshine and the dirt and the water gathered by wind was beautiful, but you couldn't pay enough attention to it.You remember how when graduation had reached its sweet tearful conclusion, you took your parents' car, the one you'd learned to drive on, and drove in circles listening to Holocene over, and over, watching Rt. 22 go by your windows, silent and fleeting, and you thought of how much, and how little, you understood about yourself.Your remember how even then you didn't totally believe that God had a good plan for you, and how you crept into bed amid piles of half-packed boxes and selfishly, you tried to insist to yourself that you could make it on your own, that you could find a better plan, or make one.You remember how on July weekend days you ran away from your house into the stickiness along the quieter suburban hills, and God told you to trust Him and you didn't know how.But then, in the watches of the night, in February, in waiting for your fever to break, you also remember: You remember all the mornings you woke up and the sun shone through your window and the birds chirruped to each other a song that you just enjoyed, because it meant only that nature was beautiful and worth it.You remember that He gave you a job at the time and walked you down the path towards it, and blessed you by keeping you closer to Him in the months that followed.You remember that on the long drives and walks and not trusting rants in the woods last year, when at 21 you didn't know if you could believe His plan was a good one, He still kept you in His grace. He still gave you wind gathering water and cool breezes and cupcakes on Sundays. He still gave you the words late on a Thursday night from an unexpected person that you saved and wondered over, about being saved as through a fire, and about the wonder that is His grace.You remember that you still knew all the words to sing with you and your mom on Sunday afternoons.It is simple: all of it because He loves you. It is simple: all of it, because He has a plan to draw you nearer to Him.It is simpler than you think, as the morning wind greets you through the rickety panes of glass: all of it, because of Him.Love,hilary

dear hilary: lent and tenderness

Dear Hilary,It's Ash Wednesday today. I woke up feeling like it is any other day. I don't understand Lent. What's the point of giving things up? What does it accomplish in us? Isn't it just a lot of fuss about nothing? Did you give something up?Love,Un-LentenDear Not-Yet-Lenten,I used to say the same thing when I slumped in my pew in the dreary February days. I would say that it didn't matter, shouldn't matter, that I "gave something up." God and I were good. I talked to Him every now and then. I prayed, I went to church, and I could have a theological argument with the best of them. So what was the fuss about Lent? Why rend my heart (I didn't know what that meant...) and come back to the Lord? Had I really gone anywhere, anyway?And the answer that question was always, is always, yes. You see, I fling myself far away from the love of God. I hide in work and play, in comfortable living, in my sense of being so busy, so important, that I cannot possibly make time to be with Him. I hurt others with my words and actions, sling sarcasm and insult around as if it's cleverness.Sometimes, oh, sometimes, I preen like a bird proud of her bright feathers, trying to get your attention over here. I scoop up facebook shares and twitter mentions and try to breathe in from it a sense of making it or going somewhere or even, maybe this will really become something and make me a real writer... And I run away from God. I hide in my desire to be noticed and affirmed. I hide from Him in my plans and schemes, and I stop listening to His voice that says, "Enough, Hilary. It's enough that you write, just for you and me." Lent isn't just about "giving things up" because we are sinful or disobedient - it is a whole heart transformation. It is about giving up the things we hide behind. It is about revelation and light. God uses Lent to reveal us to ourselves; and only then can He be revealed in us.Lent is about the light of Christ: the light that reveals our dust selves, our sinful, ashamed selves, and the tenderness of that light. Because here is my favorite, surprising, radical thing about Lent: it is also about tenderness.It is about God holding us in the midst of our realizations and heart-rending, loving us as we give up before Him things we don't know how to live without, teaching us, and in that special way only He has, wrapping us up in His tenderness and grace.Lent is about this, love: tenderness and light.So I'm giving up Facebook and I'm giving up Twitter and blog promotion and writing my way in the silence of the blogosphere these 40 days. I'm giving that up so that, with bent knees and heart, I can lean into His tenderness.Love,hilary

on living water

It was a year ago this day that I wrote about living water. I told you in my college-aged space with my rushing, hopeful words, that I longed for us to carry this living water to each other. I wanted us to bring each other cupped hands filled with that mighty Ezekiel stream. I wanted us to love the people we didn't yet love with a wild and living water.Because, I typed, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my hair wet from the post-run shower, "Every living thing that moves, wherever the rivers go, will live."Do you ever think, while you sit next to the strangers on the bus on the way to work, that they hunger and thirst for a wilder love? That as they walk through their day, they might drink an iced tea and write emails and go to spinning class, all the while wistful for something bigger?And you, do you ever do that? Do you ever walk along a street in what feels like the middle of the night, against the silence of stars and flickering stoplights, kicking the sidewalk with your longing? Do you ever find yourself staring out of a window, almost in tears, for no reason other than you don't know what's next but you wish it to be big and brave and wild and beautiful?And do you ever stop in front of your door, frozen to the sidewalk, frozen in all that you think about admitting, but don't want to? All that you would tell that person, or write in a letter, or sing out to the sky if only you believed you could?Oh, me too.Me, too.In this, my twenty-second year, I stand outside my door. I scuff sidewalks alone after a cocktail or a coffee and think about the possibilities that terrify me. In this, my twenty-second year, I cannot leave church without crying hysterically on the strip of road between the initial right turn and the dangerous narrow left. In this, my twenty-second year, I whisper, "counseling" and "writing" and cross them off and rewrite "history" and "provost" and cross them off again and rewrite, "?" and leave it.And now I sit, leaning late into the afternoon - and I hear His command: Hilary, give away My water. Maybe it is that simple. We are weary travelers all, searching for a drink of water. We thirst for the living water flowing from the temple. We look at each other longingly, wondering, where is the drink of water for my weariness?Maybe it is as simple and as difficult as you and me, traveling along the road, offering each other a drink of living water. In quiet prayers in a cold parking lot. In twenty minutes of laughter in our offices. In dinners and drinks and blog posts and daring greatly for each other. In telling you, dear reader, as scared as I am, that I am vulnerable and new to everything and afraid. In telling each other that some days, you just need to drink deep from a well of living water. That's all.Give away my water. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."Love,hilary