to my someday husband

August 01, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in letters, on love

Dear someday husband,This is not a love letter. Sorry. It's not a letter in which I say gushy things about what I imagine you'll be like, what you'll look like, what our days will be filled with. I'm not blogging a letter to you about you at all, really. I imagine you, of course. I'm 22, and foolish, and a daydreamer. You should laugh at this, because you already know how much trouble it's going to get me into. I will write you a love letter someday. But when I do, I will know who you are and what kind of toothpaste you use. I will know in what order you read the newspaper, and where you first felt at home away from home. I will have made it through the fear that you will walk away. I will write you a letter about you, and all the gushy things about how love changes us, and the good and terrifying thing it is to love and be loved by you. But not right now.I'm writing to you because my sister is getting married tomorrow and in the midst of planning my toast to her and her husband, I thought about marriage. I thought about what makes it beautiful, what makes it mysterious. I thought about what makes it worth doing. Last summer I was in a wedding, and I wrote about the delight I saw in my friend's face as she woke up the morning of her wedding and realized that she was going to unite her life with his, that they were going to become one.I see that same joy in my sister now. I see her smile like she's never smiled before, smile in the safety of her husband, smile in the wonder of him and them and the family they begin tomorrow. I see two people who gather around each other, with prayers and hopes fluttering in a great cloud, and I see love there. Jesus has come to this wedding feast, too.I'm going to be tough to marry. I am fiercely independent and yet desperate to be known. I fight more than is good for me, but I want to be peaceful. I am stubborn. The notion of grace, the kind that's free and deep and that really forgets sin and hurt and mistakes (not conveniently files them away to use in a fight later)? I'm not good at that. I am impatient. I talk too much. I trust this world by flinging my heart open but at the first sign of trouble I am a skittish colt running for the hills.I want to tell you this up front. Marrying me will be hard work. I would say sorry but I'm not really sorry, in the end, because marrying you is the same hard work and it is the kind of good that outweighs hard. My sister and her husband have the same hard work in front of them.They make promises tomorrow. These promises are heavy, filled with love and commitment, filled with the energy of a thousand hot air balloon hopes. I will cry. I cry every time I hear a couple promise that they will love and cherish and be faithful in all things, until they are parted by death. I cry every time I hear someone take their name, and take the other person's name, and in one sentence bind them together.Marriage is a mystery, someday husband. Marriage is a great and daily obedience, the kind that takes everything we've got and then more. The kind that between my stubbornness, and your stubbornness, between my picking fights and your withdrawal, between that trip to Rome and the huge fight in the airport parking lot after that trip to Rome - will be a miracle. I am going to walk down the aisle tomorrow, in a blue dress and borrowed shoes and hair someone did for me. I am going to pray as I go that I learn my sister's courage, her grace, her wisdom. I am going to pray that she is filled with joy, the kind that aches and ages and lasts through everything, even what is unknown. I am going to watch her delight, and share in it.And when you and I are sitting in a kitchen somewhere, silent and reproachful, the oven still smoking from whatever I told you I would make for dinner, I will read this to you. (Just promise not to laugh too hard at everything I get wrong. Okay?)I will remind us that marriage is a great and daily obedience. I will remind us that it is a miracle and a mystery. I will look at pictures of my sister's wedding and remember that when I was twenty-two, when I was at the very beginning, I learned love from watching my sister make a new family. And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.I will remember that I wished for nothing less for us, nothing but the gut-wrenching beautiful work this is.And I will ask you to forgive me for being so hard to be married to. And I will forgive you for the same thing. And I will look over at you across the burned dinner and laugh. Promise me you'll laugh too? And in our marriage, however far away, we will become a family.Love,hilary (your someday wife)

dear hilary: the four months later reminder

August 01, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in advice, letters

Dear Hilary,Do you have any advice for how to keep myself from panicking every time I make a mistake? The kind of panic that sets my heart racing. The kind that makes me want to throw up. How do you bear a mistake?Love,PerfectionistDear Perfectionist,At a job I had a few years ago, I got an email. It was from my boss, ad it asked me to explain a complaint he had received about something I had done. I read his email while eating a granola bar and plotting my next strategic move to get the guy in microeconomics to ask me out. You can imagine, then, when I read that email.I fell apart. I cried hysterically. I wrote back to my boss apologizing profusely, trying at once to justify myself and take all the responsibility. I cried through a class that afternoon. I cried in bed that night. I was utterly convinced that this was the end. I had ended my job. I had ended the office. I had ended everything.Love, I am here. I am typing into an iPhone screen from Colorado. I am alive, the office is okay. That mistake did not signal the end of all things. It didn't have that kind of power.Our mistakes rarely do. You panic from responsibility, from fear, from imagining the possible outcomes. I think it is wiser to remember that love conquers fear (even in our jobs). Remember that this mistake is yours, too, to own as part of learning and growing. Even what we do wrong is put to good use in a different kind of economy.Four months after that email, and I was fine. You should laugh, sweet pea. You wrote to me looking for what to do. But really, you're not going to need to do much other than wait. Own this as part of how we learn. Own it as you walk around the quad worrying about what went wrong. Own it with all your might, that it will teach you good things and brave things and beautiful things.And four months and then four years from now, it will be part of a story you tell to encourage someone else. It will be so part of you that you do not bear it: you love it.Love,Hilary

love moves freely

July 31, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in on love, rambling

Another airport this morning. I sit in an anonymous wooden chair, the girl in grey with the cinnamon raisin bagel and the pile of hair escaping in all directions from its elastic. The sun rises slowly this morning, pausing as clouds sweep over the tips of the plane tails, and Eric Church sings into my ear as flipflops clack against the floor. Next to me, a woman checks her iPhone. Something in her face looks worried, and she checks her watch every minute. I am suddenly desperate to know - what is your story? Who are you waiting for?But I just nudge my suitcase closer to my feet and turn away. When I look up again, she's walking towards her gate, and her seat is taken by an officer with a wrist brace drinking a diet Pepsi.My mind wanders to fearlessness, the strange dream I had last night, and then I remember what Dear Sugar wrote about love to her twenty-something self:Real love moves freely in both directions.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

When I first read this I was sitting in my single room in the middle of February. I was in the gap between exhilarated and exhausted. The joy of school, of learning history and tracing stories through time was also the aching, tired eyes of being up too late and doing too much. I was blogging without really knowing why. And I read Sugar's words as dazzlingly true. You can't convince people to love you. There isn't an argument in the world that will coax love from one person's heart into another's.This was protection for my weary heart when I read it more than a year ago. It was relief, courage to walk away, courage to tell the truth about what was unrequited, what should be let go. Then, real love moving freely in both directions meant keeping my heart a bit more guarded. I didn't give as much away.I read it again in this early morning, watching the officer and the woman with her worried face, watch the people sip their coffee and polish their glasses. And I think about how we only have a little bit of time to be with each other. And I think about how I named this blog The Wild Love, because I wanted to remind myself that we should give more than we think we can, and we should love wild.Sugar's right: you can't make someone love you. You can send your love towards them and they may not be there. You can sit at the table, ready to offer your extraordinary self, and they may not come to the other side of the table.But if I have any encouragement, from the very beginning: unrequited love is not wasted. The learning to care for someone, the hope, the teaching yourself to pay attention to how your heart works, the glimpse you get of their glorious self (even in the most agonizing moment when you realize that it will never be more than a glimpse) is not wasted.We should protect our hearts. But maybe some of what we call protection is a lack of trust. A lack of trust that love is good work, that in this divine economy, all things have purpose, all things work together for good. I built a fence, thinking that the most important thing was to be safe, at any cost.I see the woman sitting three tables away, her quiet elegance the kind that only comes with years. She crosses her ankles and chews on a blueberry muffin. Trusting begins here, smiling over at her, risking her early morning displeasure or her pointed ignoring. Wild love begins in the belief that love offered, even if not always taken, is not wasted.I smile at her as she gets up, and she frowns slightly and walks away. I smile at her retreating figure.Real love moves freely - and it trusts.Love,hilary

to my someday brother-in-law

July 25, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in letters, on love

dear hilary: the twitter failure

July 24, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in advice

Psst. I know I'm 22, and a new 22 at that - but if you ever had a question, or wanted to ponder something out loud with me in this space? Shoot me an email at hilary.sherratt@gmail.com. I would love to wonder about things with you (and I'm always looking for new questions). Dear Hilary,I don't want to write this letter to you. Writing this letter means admitting that I don't know how to do something. I am a blogger. Kind of. I am in love with writing. But I'm not being very disciplined about it. I started blogging a while ago, and then I wanted people to read my writing, and "follow" me, and I started (trying) to use Twitter, but I just... I don't know how to put my question into words - it is about discipline, and writing, and blogging, and how to do it. I don't want to fall off the horse. But I don't know how to make this writing go.Love,Twitter FailureDear Twitter Failure,140 characters. That's all you get in Twitter-land. 140 characters to share a story, a link, to ask someone a pithy question or jab at someone else with a witty turn of phrase. 140 characters and that INCLUDES spaces. I don't know who these Twitter-gurus are. Maybe they live on a mountain somewhere, coming up with ways to shorten jokes and make links zippier and find the oh-so-important tag line that will make people more likely to click over. There are Twitter parties, Tweet-ups and meet-ups and iPhone apps and Instagram. It's enough to make our heads spin and our fingers quake.It's enough to make anyone dipping at the beginning of things feel like a "twitter failure."But did you ever pause to think you didn't set OUT to be a twitter winner? You didn't start your blog because you wanted to tweet about it - you tweeted about your writing because you believed that people should read it. Because there are aching beautiful things inside you and you wanted to share them with the world. You try through twitter. You try through blogging. You try through coffee dates and prayers and shouting matches and letters written on old notebook paper.The heart of your complaint isn't about Twitter anyway, is it? It's about laziness and discipline and this work of writing.There are only two questions to ask you. Two questions, and the rest is simple:1. must you write?2. if you must, will you put your ass on the floor and write?If the answer is yes to one, then I hope your answer is also yes to two. I hope if you dig inside yourself, like Rilke tells us to in "Letters to a Young Poet" and you discover that you must write. That it sings like a bird aching to be uncaged, that it is the thing you can't help doing... then please, say yes to question two. Put your ass on the floor, as Dear Sugar says, and write. Pick a number of posts and promise your blog and your heart that you will write them. Pick the ways you share those with others - maybe twitter, maybe not... maybe you need to just write them for a while and not worry about whether anyone is reading them. But if you believe this is work you should do, then you must do it.The savvy use of Twitter will be irrelevant.Love,hilary

some mornings you wake up wondering

July 24, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in rambling, theology

beep. beep, beep, BEEEEEEEEEP. I jolt upright, panting. My fingers sleepwalk towards my cell phone, sliding it silent again. I look around. I've kicked my comforter into a heap at the foot of the bed, scattered pillows across the floor in my dreaming. I feel my arms, goosebumped and cold.I know the dog is downstairs, waiting for my father to feed him. I can hear my mother in the next room clinking hangers together as she decides what to wear for the morning. I know my brother is sprawled on the old couch under our one air conditioner, and the other brother (the red truck driving brother) is eating a bowl of cereal before his work day begins.Everything is in its place, all the people, all the animals, even the flowers that bend their petals towards the sun that hasn't quite finished rising. And then there is me: sitting in a pile of leaf-printed sheets, hair in a messy red-blond halo, wearing a T-shirt from my days in an elementary school play and an old pair of soccer shorts, and my heart is spinning.What if I have been wrong this whole time, Jesus? What if when I thought you said, "This is important," you didn't mean what I thought you meant? What if you meant for me to move to DC, to move to teaching, to move to France? What if you wanted me to go to grad school after all, and if I was there instead of here I wouldn't face this heart-and-gut-wrenching situation, this worry, this falling and failing? I dreamed I had gotten it wrong, I realize cup my chin in my hands and draw my knees up towards my chest. I dreamed he had wanted something else from me, something brighter and braver.I hear the water running for toothbrushes. I hear the coffee gurgle and drip, and somewhere in the ordinary morning below these three hundred year old floorboards, the world is moving.I swing my legs over the bed, trip over a stray book, and fall to my knees. This isn't funny, Jesus! I'm already late! I roll my eyes, but then I close them.

¹Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;² Lord, hear my voice.Let your ears be attentiveto my cry for mercy.

³If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,Lord, who could stand?⁴But with you there is forgiveness,so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

⁵I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,and in his word I put my hope.⁶I wait for the Lordmore than watchmen wait for the morning,more than watchmen wait for the morning.

⁷Israel, put your hope in the Lord,for with the Lord is unfailing loveand with him is full redemption.⁸He himself will redeem Israelfrom all their sins.

Today, I will wait. More than watchmen for the morning. The coffee will be almost gone if I don't hurry - and I race through the rest of the room, gathering shoes and glasses, putting an earring in while I try to brush my hair. Even here, though? More than watchmen for the morning. Love,hilary

to my someday son

July 18, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in letters, on love

While Preston and I are on sabbatical for the summer in our letter writing, I thought I would keep up with letters. These, though, are letters with a bit more of my imagined, someday life, and a little bit less of the every day. I wanted to store them up, these daydreams, because even though we should live in the present, there is something to every once in a while glancing out and imagining the horizon.Dear son,I am curled up in my bed in the quiet of my birthday. The house is calm, and still, and I have eaten too much cake and been loved and cherished much more than I can give thanks for. I'm 22 now, so I write to you before your dad and I have sat around with a baby book and tossed names around across our battered kitchen table. I don't know you yet, my boy, but I already love you.You know that your sister and you are the most miraculous things to happen to me. You are my first daughter and first son - and even though I am praying our family is bigger, and I can write letters to your sisters and brothers - there is something different because you were the first. I'll be more afraid for you, more afraid with you. I'll make more mistakes. I'm so sorry for the times that you wept and I raged silently because I couldn't fix it. I'm sorry that I groaned when you needed me in the middle of the night, just to hold you until you stopped throwing up (you had stomach flu, hon, and it was tough). Know that my love for you is so deep and wide I sometimes catch my breath just looking at you.I told your sister last week that I am single now, and young, in the very beginning of becoming a grownup. I know that when you meet me for the first time I will be crying and laughing and your dad will be there, holding you and crying and laughing. I hope you meet us and we seem like one, somehow, two people who share in this great love for you. You won't know it for years, but you and your siblings make me and your dad love each other better. We fall back in love every time we sit on the couch and watch you play with Legos and trucks, dance with your sister playing the recorder in the loud, squawking way.I have probably bullied your dad into writing you a letter about being a man (I made him do it when we were pretty sure we were going to get married, I bet). I don't know what it's like to grow up as a boy - but your dad is the most gentle, wonderful, strong and brave man I've ever met. He will teach you things I can't teach you. Wake him up with your questions in the middle of the night, love. Ask him all the things you don't know how to ask me.But I wanted to write to you, too, because even if I'm Mom, not a boy, you are still my bug and I want to tell you that I love you. You might get tired of hearing it. You'll sulk in a corner of the room on your fourth birthday because love doesn't look like the trip to Disneyworld you wanted. But I promise, my love for you is forever. It outlasts every time you're angry, every time you're sad, every time you fight with me about staying up late or renting the R rated movie or hide the keys to the car just when I have a big meeting. I promise to love you more because of those things.You've changed everything about my life, bug. You've changed how I eat and sleep, the dreams I have, the ideas of myself. I can't tell you how yet, because I'm still at the beginning of the story, before I know the miracle that you are. But you should always know, whenever you wonder, that becoming a mom was the greatest gift. It was the most marvelous and difficult thing that ever happened to me. Right now I think it's hard to say "no" to the wrong things, to figure out whether I should straighten my hair, to not be afraid of disappointment. Right now my life is full of long runs through the woods where God and I reckon with each other. You'll do this, too - run and talk, pray and yell and fall on your knees as the physical exhaustion opens up your heart.So until I meet you, and we go on those long runs through the park where you listen to me talk to God and you play with your brown monkey, until we fight over car keys and girlfriends, until we sit around our kitchen table or on the plane to see see Gram and Granddad in England... I promise to learn from the wiser people in my life. I promise to fall in love with your dad, whenever I'm supposed to. I promise to run and pray. And I promise to love you always, bug, even before I know you.Love,hilary (your someday mom)

dear hilary: your twenty two year old self

July 17, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in advice, letters, on love

Dear Hilary,You turn 22 today. Happy birthday, sweet pea. It's an exciting moment in your story. Another year, another step in the midst of your real, wild, precious life. This time last year you wrote a letter to yourself to try and teach yourself lessons for the future. You wanted to learn how to be patient, how to laugh, how to remember the moon rising over the Atlantic or the feeling of your muscles carrying you home.And here we are, a year later. How we grow is not best measured in years. It's a tangled, unlikely journey. You've grown much more and much less than you think. You won't really know what the last year was until you're telling someone years from now, when "Stubborn Love" by The Lumineers plays on the radio and you smile.But the very first Dear Sugar column you read (funny, isn't it? That wasn't very long ago) was from a 22 year old. It was called "Tiny Beautiful Things" and it changed your life. And now a book by the same name is on its way to you. Dear Sugar's letter was asking for advice. What would you tell yourself at 22? It seemed like the right moment, now, to write that letter.Give more than you have. When someone asks you to take a walk with them and they hold their heart out, trembling and raw, to you, take it gently. Sometimes you must give it back to them. Sometimes you must hold it in your hands and not let go. Not even when you don't know what to do and you are screaming in your head that you are only 22 and you don't know anything! Not knowing and still holding on is the gift.You are not your college transcript. You are not the silver bowls gathering dust next to your brother's Star Wars battleships - not the awards, not the opportunities, not even the ones you are most proud of. Laugh, Hilary. How could those things be the sum of who you are? You are alive and growing. There aren't boxes or categories to contain you. If your heart feels left behind, remember that love is never wasted, only given a new purpose. Remember that disappointed hopes are still beautiful. Remember that most of the work you were meant to do was in the hoping, not the coming true. Don't work too much. There is enough time. Not everything you touch is urgent.You are most wise when you admit you have no earthly idea what the hell you're going to do. You are closest to the truth when you lie in your bed sweating on a July night and whisper to Jesus that He'll have to fix it, because you can't.You aren't really very old, sweetheart. So dance to "Hello" and for goodness' sake, will you please stop worrying about how you look? It's the time you forgot your makeup and didn't care that you were the most radiant. It's the joy you have in your body and your heart that's beautiful.Call even if they don't call you back. Write letters. Do not waste your time on less than real love. Sugar's right: it moves freely in both directions. Set yourself free from trying to earn it. Give it to others as much as you possibly can, and then more.Be brave enough to be empty. Be braver than you think you need to be. And yes, you'll keep learning this over and over. Desire and heartache and confusion and courage can't be mastered in a day. Or a year. You will relearn everything a hundred times.It's a gorgeous world and a broken one. But it is your one wild life, love. Spend your heart in it. Love,hilary

for the brother and the red truck

July 16, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in on love, rambling

"Wanna drive?"I ask him hesitantly, kicking imaginary dust off the step. He looks at me, and shrugs. "Yeah, sure. I'd be up for that." I backtrack, immediately skeptical. "You don't have to! You can't just - yeah. You don't have to." He shakes his head at me, and stands up, stretching his long arms towards the pink sky. "Hil. Let's go. I'll get the key."We drive without talking for a while, Eric Church and Jason Aldean our companions through the emptied suburb streets. He has one hand on the wheel and I can just see a bit of his brown cowboy boots peeking out from beneath his dirty jeans. This is the brother who spends his days in the sun, working grounds, mowing and pruning and planting. This is the brother who puts his callused hands to the ground and takes care of things. I shift in my seat next to him, crossing and uncrossing my legs under me. I start to say something. "Can I ask you a -" but suddenly my lip is trembling and I feel like crying and I can't control myself. It sounds so stupid.He looks over as we pull up to the stop sign. "Hil? What's up?" I look out the window. He's my younger brother, I say to myself. How can I be this stupid in front of him? I want to be laughing and wise. I want to be the one who gives him the advice, who tells him the truth, who teaches him about life. But I'm still sniffling and now we're driving through a development, the same five year old maple leaves brushing against the truck. He waits."I just... I'm sad. I'm sad about - you know." He nods. A rough hand touches my shoulder for a second, and returns to the wheel. "I know. But you know, Hil, you're great. And if he doesn't see that, and if he doesn't want it, and if she keeps saying those things... well. I promise, it's because there's more going on inside them that you can't understand. But you are still you." He pauses, looks out his window. "I love you, Hil."And as he flicks on the blinker to veer home, I am crying for a different reason. My brother is wiser than anyone else I know. He is a nineteen year-old truck driving cowboy man, who takes care of things, who makes me sing Eric Church at the top of my lungs on the way home from church, who finds me in tears late one night after a fight with a friend and walks with me while I sob about how much words hurt.I can't hide from the brother and his red truck. I can't be the perfect older sister. I can't pretend to have all the answers. He teaches me, takes care of me, reminds me of the truth more often than I remind him. Sometimes the greatest blessings are the younger siblings who drive us through suburbs and hold us while we cry and come looking for our hearts when we try to hide them. Sometimes, the richest witness of Christ's love is your younger brother in his red truck.Love,hilary

to my someday daughter

July 12, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in letters, on love

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

if tomorrow wasn't such a long time

July 10, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in rambling

There's beauty in that silver singing river, there's beauty in that sunrise in the sky, but none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty, that I remember in my true love's eyes... I first heard this song when I snuck onto my sister's computer in middle school. She had an old white Mac desktop, running the very first version of OS X, and you had to know a password to get in. I remember trying a hundred different ones before I got it right. I would turn the music up, just enough to feel the strum of the guitar in my ribcage, and then I would sing.I sang because I wanted to open the cage on longing. I wanted to feel those words about my true love, even before I had an idea of what that love would look like. I wanted to set myself free from the narrow ideas of who can sig and who can't.So I sang about silver singing rivers to the smudged mirror, to the empty house. I poured out my voice- and somehow in that moment, I opened my heart.But I stopped singing for a while in college. Maybe I thought I wouldn't have time, or that it was only for the truly miraculous voices, the ones that shatter your idea of what music could be. But I think mostly I forgot how to love even the smallest attempts to open our hearts. I forgot to be unashamed of singing to my mirror about my true love and how long tomorrow is, because I thought that only belonged to people who have a true love.But singing that song belongs to all of us who long to live in love. And singing in the mirror, far from foolishness, might be the best way to keep our hearts strong and beating, joyful and true.Tonight, I am going to sing to my mirror again. I am going to sing Sarah McLachlan and Ingrid Michaelson and Justin Vernon and Emmylou Harris. And in between their good sounds and good words, I think I might find freedom.Love,Hilary

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

July 07, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in letters, theology

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

dear hilary: the facebook wedding flood

July 04, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in advice

Dear Hilary,Last year, sometime in July, you wrote about being single. You posted about being single in this quiet way, about that, "no, never" answer. And I remember reading it and wondering how you found peace with being single. Because I'm sitting here, in the middle of all these weddings and engagements and invitations and plans, gifts and registries. People my age are putting on white dresses that belong to them, not their mothers, and walking down a real aisle, not just the narrow hallway between their kitchen and their living room. It's not dress-up anymore, Hilary - it's happening. But it's not happening to me. And I look at it all, and I'm jealous and insecure and I don't know how to resist the comparisons - like what if that never happens to me. Can you help?Love, Compulsively-Clicking-Through-Wedding-AlbumsDear CCTWA,I don't want to be harsh with you, sweet pea - let me say that first and foremost. In the land of wild love, I don't want to offer harsh, bitter, it's-hard-so-suck-it-up advice. I want you to hear me when I tell you (and whoever happens to click through the links that lead them to this post): it is okay to sit down for a while in the middle of the road and feel what you feel. To stop in your week and say out loud as you drive home that YOU ARE NOT OKAY WITH ALL OF THIS, AND IT REALLY SUCKS, AND JUST IN CASE THE WORLD NEEDED TO KNOW, YOU DO NOT LIKE IT.Those feelings pestering you now will grow fiercer if you stifle them. You don't need to pretend that you've never been anything but overjoyed that you are single for all these years, and you really want nothing more than to click through gift registries and buy newlyweds sets of Ralph Lauren sheets and matching His n' Hers toothbrush holders (people do register for funny things sometimes - all those strangely shaped salt and pepper shakers, for one). You don't have to pretend to yourself that only one type of feeling is permissible. In the land of wild love, we feel what we feel. Always. It may be selfish, it may be silly, it may be blown out of proportion, but it is alive and real and denying it will not help.But in the same breath that you push your sunglasses up on your head and stamp your feet and spread your hands out in exasperation? You must laugh with yourself. This, like so many other feelings of frustration and anxiety? They can be calmed by a bit of laughter. Look at it this way: you, beautiful, complicated, intense, melodramatic, creative... you are stamping your feet at the world while all it asks you to do is trust. That is difficult work, trust. But it is even more work to worry, more work to be jealous, more work to look through all those albums with a rising tide of insecurity in your stomach.So sweet pea, feel what you feel. Then take those feelings and hold them in your hands. Aren't they just a little bit lighter than you thought? Hold all that is difficult and frustrating about being single in the facebook wedding flood up against the light of your young and wild life.There is no trick to being at peace with being single. None at all. I didn't take a magic potion when I wrote that blog post, and if you read more posts tagged, "dating" over there, you can tell that 99% of the time, I am stamping my feet about this very thing. Actually, I think I stamped my feet about it yesterday... But love, it isn't a question of finding the magic fix. It's a question of your willingness to laugh with yourself. It's a question of not letting all of this weigh too much. It's a question of buying those strangely shaped salt and pepper shakers and resisting the urge to click through facebook albums...There is a facebook wedding flood in all of our lives - a flood of people having what we think we deserve, what we want for ourselves. When the flood hits, put on your galoshes and your rainhat, and laugh.Love,Hilary

a humble book list

July 02, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in Uncategorized

A tweet catches my eye as I scroll through my phone while tapping my foot against the tough old linoleum. I'm beginning my new job the next day, the job I never dared dream I might have, and my stomach is lined with butterflies beating their soft wings. So as I look through Twitter, hoping for a distraction, hoping that someone will tell a funny story about falling into a puddle or tweet something sarcastic and fabulous about Girls, I see that Sarah Bessey is writing about 10 books every day for a week. What would I include in a list of 10? I used to play this game with my friends - what books would you bring with you if you suddenly went mute and people could only understand your heart through these books? What would you give them? What books would you bring to a desert island? What books would you travel with, even if you had no money, and no way to get home.And there it is: the inspiration for my 10.What books make home for you, even if you aren't home? Here is my list, humble and small - if you like, share yours too?1. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Roberto Calasso)2. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)3. In the Time of the Butterflies (Julia Alvarez)4. Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)5. Sense & Sensibility (Jane Austen)6. The Living Fire (Edward Hirsch)7. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)8. The Complete Short Stories (Flannery O'Connor)9. Watership Down (Richard Adams)10. Til We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis)May books ever bring us home, make homes within us.Love,Hilary

of Flannery O'Connor and calling, a letter to preston

June 28, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in poetic

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share about mystery, wonder about faith and the long walk of obedience, tell stories about Gossip Girl and God's grace. We would love for you to join us in the comments. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,You would understand how the sight of the white farmhouse ripped the air from my lungs in a quick, sharp breath. There it was: the deep front porch with white rocking chairs, the red tin roof, a peacock peering from behind a wall of chicken wire. In front of me the grass, browned with Georgia summer, spilled down towards a pond. I thought of the Holy Spirit that descended like an icicle. I wandered towards the back, found the barn (the hayloft, you know?), and saw spread out before me the map of her wild, violent love of the world and her commitment to it.Flannery O'Connor lived here, I almost giggled as I watched my feet step onto the same floorboards, felt the air moving gently across the porch. This is where she wrote "Good Country People" and "The Enduring Chill" and "The Comforts of Home." It was better than strolling through a movie set or seeing Forrest Gump's bench in a square in Savannah. I saw the typewriter, imagined how she sat there, day after day, forcing herself to write even when she didn't want to. I imagined her bickering with her mother and feeding her peacocks. I imagined her watching the world. And I closed my eyes and ran down to the pond with my friends. And God said, "Here you are. I send you."I don't think he's going to send me to Andalusia to write short stories of violent grace. I don't think he necessarily wants me to write stories at all. But I know he sends me to echo back the unselfconscious love of learning. I know he sends me to commit myself to higher education, to making the space where students meet Flannery O'Connor and Heidegger and Wollstonecraft. He brings me to Andalusia to send me back filled with hours of discussing Parker's back and whether or not Mrs Turpin really understands the revelation. He sends me back home full of awe and shameless love of stories and this world.You wrote to me saying that cameras are shields, that you don't want to give it all up and follow Him. And I almost never want to. It's only when He catches me in those moments of unselfconscious, shameless love - when I'm caught up in what I'm doing and I've forgotten to be worried if someone is looking, if anyone else is impressed, if my comment was the most insightful or witty - in those moments Jesus whispers in my ear that I'm being sent out to do His will, not mine. In those moments, Jesus pushes me out towards the cliff and says, "I'm sending you across. Trust me and go."And standing in the porch at Andalusia, caught in a moment of shameless awe and wonder, He pushed. I wonder if you have those moments, too - the ones where you forget yourself, and realize only hours later that you are still you? The ones where it really is just about the discussion, or the story, or the long walk along the waterfront or the argument about public policy or climbing the mountain? Where does God catch you lingering in awe and push you?Love, and grace for the calling,hilary

dear hilary: can we have it all?

June 26, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in advice

Dear Hilary,Last week there was this article that everyone went wild over. It was retweeted and linked and talked about over Facebook. It lingered in conversations in coffee shops. I overheard people in lunch lines and laundromats asking: can women have it all?Well, Hilary? Can we?Love,WorkingDear Working,I read that article while eating homemade macaroni and cheese out of a handmade bowl at my high school. I read and pondered - what did I think about family and home and work and ambition and love and sex. But the list kept getting longer, each aspect of life added in a tangled mess. I tried to draw out the pieces of the life I dream of, and my napkin was so covered in scribbles and lines that I threw it away in frustration.You see, working, I don't think that we're asking each other the right question. We are so worried about "having" it all that we forgot that we don't "have" any of our relationships or our work or our dreams. They are always bigger than us. They involve other hearts and minds. They take effort and acceptance.We ask "can we have it all?" but I almost want you to ask instead, "what kind of beautiful and good life do I envision?" and then chase it with the full realization that the dream is too big to achieve and that grace is the game changer.I want to tell you, sweet pea, that women can have it all. I so much want us to have the space to have careers and families and road trips and wine tastings and books and surprise parties. I want us in politics and law and dentistry and poetry. To make that dream happen I think we have to change the rules of the game. I think we need a new idea of what it looks like for anyone to raise children and advance their career and tend to their gardens and worship and rest. We will need to make our words about "having it all" mean something new for everyone, not just women climbing career ladders or staying at home or sitting in their laundromats worried sick that they can't fall in love because then how will they go to grad school?But I want more from us, too. I want humility as we pursue this. If life is gift, if it is grace and luck and mystery, if it is about becoming the strange beautiful self you are created to become? We have to give up the idea that we can demand a particular package. We have to give up the idea that one "having it all" fits any of us, any of our lives as they are lived in the mess and glory.This life is not a possession. It is a gift. Women and men cannot have it, own it, or make it fit into the box we designed at the beginning of our journeys.We can only keep pushing forward in the direction of real life. We can push towards what is true and just, and we can obey the wild and surprising callings that come our way: callings of work and mothering and being married or being single and being a friend and worshipping and thinking. We can obey those callings and laugh- because it is bigger than us, this work we do, and we are only at the beginning.Love,Hilary

Learning to forget myself

June 26, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in rambling

I fiddle with the screen, adding songs to a playlist. It's early morning and I am on a plane to Georgia. Flannery O'Connor and the sweet, sticky south call to me as my northern body scoots down in the seat. Some days I hide to see if anyone will notice me. I test them, these normal, tired everyday people bound for home or on a long journey. I watch them for a sign- do you see me? I whisper as I make my way to the bathroom at the end of the aisle. Do you think I am extraordinary? Do you wonder about who that yankee girl with the long reddish hair is, and where she is going, and what thoughts swirl through her head? The baseball caps around me don't stir. The women trying to drink their coffee as we hit choppy air keep sipping. The children cry and color and push their feet against the seat in front of them.I catch my own eye in the tiny bathroom mirror and am surprised by the force of the response. "Hilary Joan, stop worrying!" I tell myself. "This is an airplane. You don't need someone to be in awe of you."I am surprised by how much I wanted awe. I want to turn heads and stop traffic, I want to leave an impression. I want to linger in someone's mind.I put my hands on either side of my face. "Go sit and write." I do. I smile at the woman waiting in line for the bathroom and squeeze back into my middle seat. I smile at my seat mates, who turn away and sleep or recheck their email.I don't have an answer to that desire, that hunger to be known and awed, that strange mix of selfishness and truth (for we are all extraordinary marvels). But I begin to write.

Humility is throwing yourself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

- Madaleine L'EngleOh Lord, grant me the grace to forget myself.Love, Hilary

dear hilary: the best kind of balance

June 22, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in Uncategorized

(this blog post is a bit belated, friends, but it seemed good to write and share it, anyway).

dear hilary,

I just graduated from college. How do I balance and prioritize relationships with people that are now long distance, versus the people who are actually around, in my physical space? How does that work?

sincerely, a social introvert

Dear a social introvert,

My first temptation when I read your question was to tell you that there is no difference between the people who live far away from you and the people who live close to you. In terms of your heart, that is - there is no difference. I want to tell you to hold fast to those people far away - to invest your time in them and your energy in them. To write them letters and call them and keep tabs on their lives.

But (you knew that was coming, didn't you?). There is something different. There is something different about telling a funny story over the phone while lying on your bed in 93 degrees, laughing until your sides ache, and telling the story across the same table while the person can see you actually laughing. There must be a difference, or else why would we miss each other when we're apart? There must be a difference, or else why would there be so much joy and so much sadness in airport terminals?

So much for my first temptation, social introvert. You and I both know there is a difference between the people who inhabit our immediate physical space and the people who don't. And I want to acknowledge that fully.

But (did you know there would be another "but" in this letter?). I also don't think that distinction is the first one you should pay attention to when you think about how to invest your time and your self. If you're really looking to love others, if you really want to create in your life homes for the people you love? You shouldn't worry too much about whether or not they are close or far away. Each has its own difficulties. That funny story that's so much easier to tell the person who lives next door? It has its equivalent. It's easier to share deep things across distance - we don't waste as much time on the silly or unimportant as we tend to when we're in person. When we're at a distance, friendships stretch and bend, but they find a different strength. They're tested. They give us the chance to be brave and practice loyalty and work hard. When we're in person, we're tested by proximity. Those friendships give us the chance to practice patience, persistence, and humility.

I don't want to tell you to balance them by having an equal number of long distance friends and next-door-neighbor friends. We all know that wouldn't work. Instead I want you to find balance by looking at the people over their place, the friend behind the phone call or the letter or the surprise visit after work. Look at the person, and then go for it.

The best kind of balance is the one where you love more than you think possible.

Love,

hilary

I pray the Collect for Purity, a letter to preston

June 21, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in Uncategorized

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share about mystery, wonder about faith and the long walk of obedience, tell stories about Gossip Girl and God's grace. We would love for you to join us in the comments. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I have a confession: I'm afraid of the hungry. I avoided feeding them in the Saturday morning ministry in college. I crossed the street too often in Boston when I saw them ask their silent question. I once ran two full blocks away from one man outside my favorite Starbucks in Washington, DC because I knew he was the face of Jesus and I couldn't look at him.So when I read your beautiful, gut-wrenching piece about these vagabond wounded, this circle of prayer and the way they taught you to pray, I'm reminded that I don't know how to pray for them. I'm afraid to try. I'm afraid to offer them my silly, selfish, full-of-petty-desires words.I read what you wrote about the spirit of that place, Jerry's thundering voice and call to repentance, it made me wonder about my own whispered prayers. You see, I don't really know how to pray well out loud for those big, bold things - how to call out for repentance or tell the story about death and life, or pray that the Spirit of the Lord be mightily upon a person. It's not that I don't want to talk to God. I talk to Him more than anyone. When I run I ramble on and on about my heart and His heart and the marvelous things He does and the things that make me mad because I don't understand. I want to talk to Him all the time. I want to pray.But the words, Preston? The big words about the big story? I'm tongue-tied. I open my mouth and nothing happens. Remember when I said that I am on my knees but without an altar call? When I told you I was in love with God, rooted in that love, but it's a quiet story? This is where I feel my whole self wrestling with whether I can do this, walk this Christian walk, and be tongue-tied about preaching the good news.I don't know how to pray for the hungry. For the brokenhearted. For the people I love to love Jesus. For the curious and wandering to find Him (or be found by Him). I don't want to pray a laundry list. I don't want to fake it. I don't want to be silent. So I run away from homeless ministry or from altar calls or from talking about my faith with people who only know the barest skeleton of it. I hide behind my books and blogs and theories about St. Aquinas and St. Anselm.And then every Sunday I hear the Collect for Purity. Almighty God, unto you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we might perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. I cry because there the Church has found a way to help me pray when I'm tongue-tied. There the Church has met my feeble laundry lists and filled it with riches. For we pray this prayer over all of the world - saints and sinners alike. The Church in all her history has reminded those of us who don't know what to say that God is mighty, all-seeing, a cleansing Spirit. The Church reminds us that our hope rests in pursuing perfect love of Him who died, and magnifying His name with every fiber of our being.So I pray the Collect for Purity, Preston, because I love God and I love His people. Because I don't know how to pray. Because I am afraid of the altar calls. Because I am a tongue-tied lover of Jesus.Love, and the whole Collect for Purity is prayed over you,hilary

I am Atalanta

June 19, 2012 by Hilary Yancey in Uncategorized

There is no traffic today. We drive through towns we know too well, across the old bridge, wheels kicking up gravel. Zoe Keating loops her cello through our hearts and the car, and the sun wanders in and out of the afternoon. I am staring out from behind sunglasses, stretching my arms out towards the dashboard. She laughs as I heave a sigh, groan about these lessons we must learn. "The deep trust?" she asks. "Yes, that," I reply, and nothing more needs to be said. We change the music to Ben Knox Miller, park the car at the edge of the ocean and look out.

The water is grey and fiesty. It tosses the boats, fighting against their bright oars and heavy nets. We watch for a moment, how nature and humans dance together. "The water today - it's... you know." I nod - we do know, finishing in our heads those endless analogies and comparisons we make: I am like water, she is more like air. We play with the ideas - how I love the ocean, and she loves the wind, how I think freedom is anchored somehow to earth and for her freedom is flying.

"What's your siren, Hil?" she finally lets the question slip through in between the guitar and piano chords. "What does it sound like? Where does she come from?" And I recognize the bigger question - how do you understand relationships? How do you protect yourself, tempt others? What's the story of you?

"I don't think I am a siren, actually... I think I am Atalanta." I can't believe the story until I speak it, but then I remember. How Atalanta believes everything is a competition, her worth determined by her victories. She is the untouchable, the challenger. Race with me? she asks those around her. Atalanta loves the thrill of the race - mind and heart and body all engaged together, the elegance and danger of running. "Oh, Lil. I challenge them all. I challenge them to race me." She shakes her head in amazement. I am Atalanta.

Two days later we're on the phone. "Oh!" I say, interrupting her train of thought. "The golden apples, Lil? I get it. They are the brighter truths. The bigger things. I stop racing when I am distracted by something more beautiful than the race. When something beyond myself appears, and I chase that instead of victory." She laughs. "But really! It's the comedy kind of deceiving - I am deceived only to realize a bigger truth. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"Yes. It's beautiful, Hil. And powerful, too." We keep talking, and I keep pacing the warm floorboards of my room. I am Atalanta. I love to run, but I can see something more beautiful than the race. I'm compelled by what is beyond running. Brighter truths.

But what is most beautiful isn't the story, Atalanta or the sirens or Jacob wrestling with God, or any of the hundreds of stories we find ourselves in, wanderers looking for a way home. What is most beautiful is this phone call, and this drive, these hours of wandering together. What is most beautiful is this friend, who opens the back door of my heart and steps inside. What is most beautiful is walking through the story with her.

"So I am Atalanta." We laugh again, and say our goodbyes. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Tonight, I'm thankful for fellow wanderers in words. Tonight, I'm thankful for the bright, beautiful stories - and for the hearts that explore them.

all my wild love, hilary