burst with joy

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

dear man on the metro

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

i begin again

courage: to tell your story with your whole heart.we can't practice compassion with other people until we are kind to ourselves. This. It's this I have avoided and pretended not to know.But compassion -is a result of authenticity -of vulnerability.Nothing less.To have a compassionate imagination, as one friend named my dearest ambition over swirling wine glasses and chocolate cake, to walk into another person's very story- that takes the kind of gentleness we cannot know until we have done it. And we cannot do it without beginning at ourselves.I typed this blog post weeks ago, when I first discovered what felt at the time to be the most revolutionary, inspiring, terrifying, truthful talk I had ever heard. Brene Brown told her audience (and me) on her Ted talk that we cannot begin to be compassionate, to build connection, to grow in love, unless we are vulnerable.Really, she said, the people who live wholehearted don't think about whether vulnerability is particularly good or bad; they simply recognize that it is necessary.But last night I didn't want it to be necessary.I didn't want to build anymore. I didn't want to be vulnerable, to walk around with my thoughts on a blog or in the air against the black sky flecked with a lazy snowstorm. I didn't want to think anymore about whether I tell half the truth or the whole truth, whether there is a window into my heart or not.Sometimes the courage meets the hard place and the messy place and it seems to evaporate. Sometimes the Wednesday night heading home at 10:45 makes you think those words about authenticity and vulnerability are just words on a page without any reality, any connection to you, any roots.And maybe that's okay.Maybe it's okay to begin there. To begin again, there.Some days you hear beautiful and true things and you don't want them to be beautiful or true, and you begin there. Some days, you build bird by bird, brick by brick, and you have to pause and admit to yourself that bricks and birds are not always easy. And you begin there. And if you, wherever you are, find your courage meeting the harder places, find your eyes and arms a little weary, find your beginning in the bird by bird -I'm with you.We begin here.Love,hilary

when it is all quiet

I never really know what to do about writing. There were weeks this year when it felt like the light shone and the world just opened itself up to being written down. There were weeks when I thought, there aren't enough minutes in the day for all the things I want to say, for the draft blog posts and the poems and the maybe someday play.And then I hit the hard.I hit the twenty-something ache, the weeks of working with tired eyes and outdated eyeshadow. The weeks of missed Skype dates with friends far away and picking at limp salads at lunch and worrying again about the same laundry lists of things, repeating conversations I've already had with myself too many times to count. I wore the clothes I love without loving my body in them. I put on the CD in the car called, "You are a Girl on Fire" but I was never listening. I heard people talk and laugh, and I talked and laughed, but I wasn't really listening. I didn't lean in towards their story, close my eyes over the wine and imagine all that they were saying behind what they were saying. I didn't listen.When you don't listen, you can't write.You cannot tell us how the car sounds scrambling over the rocky leftover snow on a Tuesday morning when you are late. You cannot tell us how it feels to shrug on yet another cardigan because you're yet again worried that you don't know how to dress yourself and you're close to being almost 23, for gosh sakes, and you still fight these old battles with your body and heart and mind.You cannot tell the story of discovering there are at least five poems that you want to work on, how you realize it in a rush while checking your email in a crowded room at the National Press Club that one of the things that you want most is to work on those five poems.You cannot put a pen to the page when you aren't listening. Because writing is more about listening than it is about writing.That's why playwrights eavesdrop; so that they can capture the sound of characters in rush hour on the green line, or the silence that lingers when a couple stops arguing to order matching lattes in the hipster coffeeshop. That's why poets talk about how birds holler through sycamores, or how love is shaped in clinking spoons nestled in their drawer next to the steak knives. That's why all of us who blog, who scribble on napkins, who try to breathe life into syllables and consonants have our ears to the ground and the sky.So it has been quiet, because in my haste and frustration, I stopped listening. And in my haste, frustration, not-hearing, I realized how much I love to write. How not writing is an ache that fills me, seeps in the crevices of my Saturday nights and my Thursday afternoons.And the ache is about love. And the ache is about calling.And the ache says, light another candle along the road.And the ache says, listen.Love,hilary

life is fragile

The day slants towards sunset at 5, 4:30, 3:57... I can see pink between the school buildings and I hesitate to look up, knowing that another day has already slipped past me.I want to stop all the clocks and silence the chatter. I want to stop the poems leaking from my fingers and I want to gather them back up again.I want to remind the world that it doesn't have to spin so relentlessly, that it could stop, even for a moment - because there is grief on Wednesday nights in evening prayer in an almost-empty sanctuary, because there are days when Fernando Ortega sings "Praise Him Still" and you know that it is only in the very smallest corner of your heart that you understand that to be true. And you are silent. And you cannot sing, but you sing next to your father and hold his hand and cry.Because heart attacks can snatch a life more precious than you understood, at the moment you were laughing over a cocktail, at the moment you were longing to write a poem, caught up in yourself - because life is so fragile, so beyond what I understand, that I write a whispered prayer somewhere and then I make an offering.What do you want? To play Horse Feathers on the radioin my car, that absurd violinagainst my chest.To bathe in the music, in a drivewayin a February in a year of darkness.To close my eyes.To trust someone else's composedUniverse for three minutes, fourteen seconds:a last waltz in this bed, starving robinsin thistled spring.I want life gathered, fragile –That violin, playing me.Sometimes the only offering in the face of a beloved professor's sudden departure is to write something, anything, about the fragile, gathered life -and the violin that plays as we etch sadness in our days,and the violin that plays, to praise Him still, somehow.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

what mama did: sharing at lisa-jo's

Today I get to share over at Lisa-Jo's blog about what my mom did that I cherish, treasure, remember with all my might as I grow up.And my mama? She laughed. And taught me how to laugh, too.Won't you come join us for the whole series of what mama did?She has offered her life to us in bits and pieces over the chipped mugs for years. Each time I feel a story swelling in the bright and cramped kitchen, I wrap my fingers around the tea (it is always tea) and settle my heart down to the steady rhythm of mothers and daughters who make time. I pray the winged prayer of grateful daughters everywhere: Oh God, thank you for my mom.Keep reading with us, over here?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

when we grow up together

Dear younger self,You are not so much younger. You're a fresh nineteen, scurrying back from studying in the student center on a February night. You're wearing a dark green puffer coat that you regretted almost instantly after you bought it because you don't think green is a flattering color and the other girls that winter had sleek black wool coats and chestnut brown Uggs and walked through the world with a poise to rival Grace Kelly (or so you tell yourself).But you're marching back to your room holding onto a hot chocolate and shouldering a bag full of political philosophies and Pascal. Just behind you, two boys are laughing in low voices as they carry a pizza box and hunch forward against the wind. You can hear their voices, and you're wondering what you should do or say if you know them.And then you're staring at the stars.You see, your boots flew out from under you on a patch of black ice and your hot chocolate flew up around you and when you realize what's happening (that you're wiping out in public on a Tuesday evening), it's from the ground, looking up at the night sky.The two guys pass you by. They laugh - you chuckle weakly, try to get to your feet... fall again. They pause to ask you if you "need help."You think, Let me think. I've fallen twice by myself, spilled hot chocolate onto this coat I wish I wasn't wearing, and am sitting in a pile of books, in front of some first floor windows in FULL VIEW of anyone inside or outside, and would like to die. Right now. You say, "I'm good. Thanks."And you creep inside mortified, face flushed like the tulips that mysteriously promise to bloom in spring. You sit on your bed and pull off your wet clothes and throw Pascal and politics onto your bed and barely muster the energy to laugh with your roommate who thinks you're the funniest thing.And as you lie in bed, you cry because today was the day I fell on my butt in that ugly coat in front of people who don't know me but now know me as "that girl who fell on her butt and spilled hot chocolate on her head." Honey bun, three years later, you're going to think of this story as you and your mom shovel the lower driveway free of two feet of snow. You will haul on boots and fleece pants that match hers and rain pants from 1980 and your dad's Patriots hat with earflaps and walk into the white stillness. You will make silly faces into your iPhone camera and work out an elaborate but not wholly efficient system of moving snow. This will involve you standing in a hip-deep drift and scraping snow ONTO yourself so she can shovel a clearing for the cars to get out.You will remember how we cannot always be so hard on ourselves. You will remember that it is our ridiculous moments - girl on fire, digging snow in rain pants from the 80s moments - that draw us further into the world. Because who does not long to be a little ridiculous sometimes? Who doesn't want to make a silly face in the snow drifts?Oh, sweet younger self, I'm so glad you and I grow up together. I'm so glad you fell on the way back to your room three years ago. I'm so glad you teach yourself to laugh at these moments, because I think someday the older Hilary, the one yet to come, she will be wiser because of you and me together. She will have a long letter of memories of snow falls and shoveling, moments of crying in her bed for her awkward duckling self and moments of that self, laughing like this:

(the amazing mandie sodoma)

And it will all be a part of the most beautiful growing up.

Love,hilary

dear hilary: no small work

Dear Hilary,There is a saying, "there are no small parts, only small actors." I think it's meant to tell us that we are all important, somehow, that our one line in a play is not less meaningful than the monologues, our place at the back of the corps de ballet is not unimportant, even if we might never be cast as the lead in Tchaikovsky. But Hilary, is that true everywhere? How can it? Aren't we supposed to want the work to be meaningful? Aren't we supposed to seek positions of influence and do good in them? Aren't there small jobs? And small work?Love,My work feels smallDear My work feels small,My answer is a resounding and beautiful and emphatic no. There is no small work. There is no small work in a world where something as simple and apparently stupid as being the person on the bus who always asks their seat neighbor how they are can change everything. There is no small work in a world where the right sentence in an email, the right amount of foam on a latte, the best swept ballroom or the newspaper print copy edited for the fiftieth time can be an expression of love.And it can always be that.The phrase about small parts and small actors leaves out the truth about small actors. They are not small because they wished for a bigger part - they are small because they didn't imagine how they might love and live wild in their small part. It isn't selfishness, I think, to want and long for meaningful work. It isn't selfishness to fall into the trap that tells us that meaning is attached to power. There is a lot of good we can do when our voices can speak speeches and our hands touch many people and our platforms have followers galore. There is a lot of good, a lot of beautiful, we can do when we can bend the ears and minds of those around us.But we will only do that good if we build, bird by bird, moment by moment, latte and copy edited letter and email and photocopy, a heart that's widened with an imagination for love.We have to build up a heart for love. And then we have to love.Do that, and there will be no small work.There will be days when the work feels small. When you wonder how any of it can be about love, or about influence, or about the big ideas we once had about changing the world. There will be days when the purpose of vacuuming eludes you. When the tenth meeting about the color of the balloons runs you ragged. When answering the phone feels as important as counting specks on the wallpaper. When you cannot think about babysitting for one more second before you think, I have no idea what this accomplishes in the world... I cannot promise you, my sweet friend, that we will always trust that our work matters. We probably won't. But if we do it even then? If we dare to tell ourselves in those moments that even this work (maybe especially this work), is always about the depth and quality of our love, the tenor and passion of our one-liner in the great play? If we dare to imagine ourselves away from the simple chasing after power?Oh, then, I think we will change the world.One latte, one photocopy. One smile, one remembered favorite coffee flavor for a coworker. One promise, one extra twenty minutes of laughter and compassion behind closed office doors, one email at a time.Because there is no small work in a world this hungry for love. I dare us to love it that much together.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

when galaxies overwhelm you

They said thank you for outer space. For stars in their many explosive elements, for the chaos of the cosmos. They said thank you, and then asked what the stain was on the table cloth - a white bit of wax from a candle as equally compelling as the rapidly expanding universe.She told me that the we can map things on DNA. That from Shakespeare to binary code to the ATGC of our beings and back, and it's perfect. Someday, maybe, scientists will figure out how to store information inside DNA and synthesize it. More flexible than computer chips, more durable, evolved over the billions of years to be something that lasts.I read that the galaxies are racing apart at rates we can't understand. That equations are the only way we can describe those first few moments of universe ignition, where a hair of difference at a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond holds the potential for life. I read and read, all these stories about how vast it is. I close my computer. Because our bones are calcium carbonate which is what makes shells and the white cliffs of Dover, because we are water and so is the ocean, because we are material, and so is this world, and yet it is a thumbprint among billions of others.When we are overwhelmed by our smallness, we rush to extravagant declarations of our importance. We whisper that we have been singled out as a people. We hug ourselves in the dark and proclaim that we are unique, particular, singular being with singular purpose. We often pray prayers loud and defiant, hoping that our voices will drown out the startling recognition that we do not know the purposes of our God in the other corners of His world. That we do not know why he made a world at once intelligible and elusive, what he is working in the far-flung hiding places in galaxy NGC 6872. It bothers us not to know, doesn't it? It bothers us to imagine that God has mysterious and infinite purposes outside our understanding. What if that means we will not know everything? What if that means we are not the center of the universe?And God laughs at these flares of our temper and continues to delight in His laws and their mysterious, glorious revelations. And the whole heavens declare His glory, while we stare up at them and still wonder if we can chase down the knowledge, outrun God's creativity, gain control for ourselves.But the children are right, aren't they? We should instead say thank you. We should fling prayers of gratitude out from ourselves into this vastness, wing a prayer in praise of NGC 6872 and all that we cannot know about it.  Because in the moments we doubt our significance we must be caught up in Him who made all things, and all things good.When galaxies overwhelm you, give thanks. Because He is that infinitely creative. Because He is that beautiful, that real, that present. Stand under His sky. Sing out with all your being. Echo all the wonder you hear.Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? And echo back the wonder.Love,hilary

the photograph of my mother

I stole a picture from my parent's mantelpiece in August. It's a rough, 4x6 kind of frame, bent at corners from years of being flung into a suitcase or a box, dust glued to its glass. The back stand of the frame is bent, so it can never stand by itself, solitary against the clean white of a wall or the cherry wood coffee tables of the houses I cut out pictures of in my spare time.I stole it at first because I wanted to fill my office with the evidence that I belonged to something. I wanted picture frames, books on shelves, cute mismatched lamps, a bulletin board with postcards of Van Gogh paintings. I told myself that the old frames would give it a classic, unstudied elegance. I put tea on my shelf and all the mementos of a life still at the beginning: books from my law and ethics class sophomore year next to granola for the days I forget to pack my lunch, glossy prints of faculty art exhibits, my diploma sandwiched between Thirst by Mary Oliver and a bag of Port City Java coffee. I put this picture on my desk next to the larger, shinier one of me hugging my dad at graduation. I almost forgot it.One day when I reached for the phone I knocked it over. It made a sweet, quiet clink onto my desk, a polite cry of dismay. And when I went to pick it up again, I looked at it.And I saw my mother.In this photo she is standing outside in the garden in England, the climbing roses flushed with early spring. The windows behind her are cracked open a bit, to let in the smell of wet, renewed earth - a smell that my dad has always said is in our blood, is good for us. Her arms are folded against her chest in a cable sweater and a pink checked shirt peeks out near her throat.It is the softness that startles me - my mother smiling in such gentle delight, her head tilted and leaning forward, her eyes laughing, but looking through you. She can see me in this picture, even though she doesn't know my name. She can see all the years unfolding between her and Dad, and her gaze has a bigger love than the beginning love of romance. It is mother love and friend love; the love of God and her three year old students in Sunday School. It is the love the house we make as home. It is on your knees love, doing the dishes again love, walking the dog with her twenty-two year old on a Sunday afternoon.There, on my desk, between roses and white windows, between the phone that doesn't ring and a graduation hug, is my mother.The woman I am searching to be already in front of me, smiling at the me that does not yet exist, with a smile that the winery owner will tell me on a Saturday night unites us."I knew right away who you were," he will say, leading me over to where my mom and our guests are sampling reds. "You're the spitting image of your mother."And you will smile, realizing for the first time, that is the biggest compliment someone could pay you.Love,hilary

the light is gentle

The morning light is sweet but I am not. It's 8:58. Exactly 12 minutes from start time in Sunday School, and I am 20 minutes and a full change of clothes and teeth-brushing away from church. I whisper something about being foolish, throw on the only things that I can find in a bleary eyed haze. I run out the door, spit my mouthwash on the side of the steps that have been breaking since I can remember. My car is cold. It shudders and groans as I lurch out the driveway.Tears prick at my eyes. I'm late, late, late. I speed up through the yellow light at an intersection on Route 1. It's been a long weekend, I tell myself, maybe it's okay to just be a little tired. Maybe it's okay to just be a little scattered. My hair is falling out the braids I slept it, and I can feel bits of it tickling my neck. There is a blue stain on my coat. There is mud on my shoes, and I should have worn socks but I forgot. But my protestations about "having a little grace for myself" (even when I say it as the car rounds the curve to 97), they aren't a match for the steady, familiar rhythm of scolding.And all you good girls who read this, I know you know what I mean - how even in the midst of a big smile and a bright laugh, we're usually thinking about something that wasn't quite right, something that fell a little short. Sometimes we joke about this - call it "the curse of perfectionism" or even pray that we might have a little real grace thrown into our life. But most of the time, I'm still counting the number of missed cues. I'm still thinking about an unsent email or text or visit. I'm still thinking about what might have been better. I'm still resolving not to mess it up again.I run into the classroom. They're already at work, and I get nothing but smiles. No scolding, no "where were you?" And my profuse apologies are quickly put aside, as they want to tell me about the good monster they are making with paper, who only eats flowers, about the colors of the liturgical year and the song we sing about them.And a three year old girl stops in the middle of her puzzle and proclaims, "I WAS WAITING ON YOU". She throws herself into my arms, purple and pink fuzzy socks pulled up past her small knees.I am going to come apart at the seams. Instead I trace shapes and cut them out. I straighten. I use small pieces of Scotch tape to fasten a little identification card to each compartment where we keep the elements of the altar work. When we sit in the circle to sing, and to tell Jesus about our birthday parties, about aunts having babies soon, about dads who paint the basement, the boys squirm and fidget.But then the teacher asks, "This word on our prayer table is praise. When I think about giving praise to God, I think about giving thanks. What are some of the things we are thankful for?"They name bunny rabbits and dogs. They name winter and snowball fights. And then that three year old, she looks at me and she says, "Thank you Jesus for you."The light is that gentle and that fierce.I didn't stay to church. I didn't think I could bear it, encountering any more of this story about me and God in the midst of His people (even though that's good and we should).I drove weeping onto the highway. I drove weeping for being 22 and in the midst of such richness, feeling so paralyzed. For my hair falling out of its braids and my bare feet in their shoes. For all of the things that her prayer reveals in its gentle light: that God would rather sit with me weeping in my car in the back of the Starbucks parking lot. That nothing matters more to Him than this strange chapter of the story where I spend most of my time oscillating between fingerspelling words to practice ASL in my car to dreaming about someday I will be wise to wrestling with the answer "not now". God would rather nothing better than me and Him in the Starbucks parking lot. God would rather nothing better than the light creeping in through my shuttered heart. So He sends His children to teach me what I once imagined I would be teaching them.But when it comes to grace, I have everything to learn.And the light is gentle. Love,hilary

for when it isn't time yet

I've been thinking about those big dreams we have. Sometimes people call them "the God-sized dreams." Sometimes we call them wild. Sometimes we call them brave or reckless or even the dumbest thing we've ever thought. At some point, I'm guessing you've heard yours call out to you, and you've said all these things and more about it.But the moment that we have this dream, even while we resist it and we run away from it? We also start to expect it to arrive. Immediately.We want progress towards the goal, we want to start running, we want to see the fruits of this big dream we can hardly dare to dream, and all right away.When we move across the country or the world, when we start the new program or job, when we give up the things that were familiar and safe because we have this dream of becoming something really unexpected and delightful, we unload our bags and think, "Where are you, dream?"Where is the fullness? Where is the business I've successfully started, the website with 3,000 views a day, the advanced degree with a specialization in metabolomics? Where is the person I've come to become? I've asked this almost every day since I graduated and set off to chase a big dream of writing, a dream of higher education, a dream of wild love. I drive along the same roads piled with melting snow and look at the same sunrise spilling through the black fingers of the trees, and I want to know, Why haven't I gotten my big dream yet? Do you think the answer might be, it isn't quite time?We weren't ever promised that we would receive in full what we envision at first. We weren't ever told that the dream would be anything but a hard, unknown, journey through the deep dark woods and bright fires and sunrises and years.Rumi says, "When I am silent, there is thunder hidden within me."Just because the dream you dream hasn't come true yet, doesn't mean it doesn't live and roar inside you. Just because you must walk through the many years of not knowing how it will come true doesn't mean that you were wrong about it.It just means that now is the time for your silence. It just means that now is the time for the thunder to be hidden within you.Maybe you see people around you who are thundering their dream to the world. Maybe they have the pageviews, the degree, the family, the words, the settledness you crave and envy. Maybe you wonder if that is ever going to be you.You, too, have thunder hidden within you.You, too, have a big dream that is worth a thousand years of walking without knowing where.You, too, with your suitcases and uncertainty, with your waiting and your silence, are in pursuit of a bold, wild kind of dream. Now is the time for silence as you take shape. Now is the time for listening to your roommates and friends and parents.  Now is the time to make midnight grocery store runs or watching a full season of The West Wing. Now is the time to pray in your car and slam the brakes for a turtle crossing the road.And when your thunderous dream bursts forth, and you step into the midst of it, it will roar all the brighter.Love,hilary

dear hilary: gripped by fear

Yesterday, this kind of amazing and crazy thing happened. I got to share over at Lisa-Jo's space, and I would love it if you'd visit me over that way? Just click here. And if you have a question for me to ponder with you? Just email me: letterstohilary@gmail.com

Dear Hilary,

I don't think of myself as a pessimist (and I don't think others do either) but I'm noticing my tendency to expect the worst. The phone rings and I think tragedy has struck. Someone pulls me aside and I instantly assume I'm in trouble. Sometimes the fear makes me sick to my stomach.  I know worrying isn't productive and most of the things I fear never come to fruition but logic isn't loosening fear's grip on me. How can I shake it?

Gripped

Dear Gripped,

I read your question and thought about it as I drove home from sign language class. I drove in silence, asking myself occasionally what fear is, where it comes from - what might we possibly do to shake ourselves free from it?

The words that came to me as I swung my car into the driveway, and trudged up the steps to my house through the slush and rain, through the night that always feels impossibly dark, were not my own words. They were Rilke's. I wonder if you know them, from his Letters to a Young Poet?

“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

I don't pretend to really know what's going on in these words, because I'm far from having sounded the depths of much of anything. But, Gripped, I think Rilke's bigger point is that the opposite of fear is not only courage. It is also trust. 

We are all convinced that the things we do not know - the phone calls we haven't picked up, the being pulled aside by the teacher, the long silence from a friend, the unreturned email - they must be a monster. They must mean that terrible thing that we have always secretly wondered about, but never really tried to understand or imagine. Fear thrives on the things we don't want to know - thrives in darkness, in vague worry, in the unexamined and unaccepted. We too often keep ourselves from knowing the things we are afraid of. And so we do not trust them. And so the fear lives long.

To shake fear, I don't know that you always need to be brave as we typically define it. It doesn't mean being angry with yourself for your fear or trying to "outreason" or "outlogic" yourself or demanding that you suddenly be fearless.

Instead, perhaps we can shake fear by widening ourselves to receive all that the world holds for us. What might the experiences that have you shivering with fear hold for you that is rich and beautiful and good? What might they grow inside you? What might they help you become? What might the phone call bring you - can you imagine in the thirty seconds before you answer it being something marvelous? Can you widen, even if you just say it inside your head, your heart to accept this new thing?

Fear keeps you from being that fully alive self Rilke talks about: one who is open to even the most incomprehensible experiences, one who trusts that even those things which are strange and terrifying hold something good. Fear feeds on our uncertainties, but most of all, fear thrives on our lack of trust.

I think we shake it by repeating the gestures of trust over and over, in our head and in our life, until they are as natural as breathing: arms open, eyes wide, running toward the world.

It will undoubtedly disappoint us sometimes. It will be less than what we want. It will be too much. It will bring crappy phone calls and teachers yelling and family fights and silence and shouting. But all of this makes us more alive, Gripped. All of this, even the things you fear most this moment, can be the very things that are the making of you.

Trust me.

Love,hilary

He names your life beautiful

Today, I got this chance to share something over at Lisa-Jo's. You know her, I bet - the mama who speaks truth and grace into your heart because she's listening so close to what God says. The one who reminds and encourages, who cheers for us even when we don't understand it...So when she asked me if I would write a post, I dreamed and prayed wide, for words to reach you wherever you are, in this moment of your day."….When I graduated from college in May, I got lots of hugs and kisses. I got fun cards that played “Pomp and Circumstance” when you opened them. I got a nice dinner with two professors I love and Flannery O’Connor books. People showered me with wonderful gifts, with care and congratulations and Starbucks gift cards.But it turns out you don’t get a how-to book for your life...Keep reading over here?Because He names your life beautiful and rich and I want to tell you how.Love,hilary

He made you this promise

Feet shuffle quietly in the pews around me as I walk towards the lectern. I can feel my the soles of my feet touching the carpet through my thin shoes, and as I walk, I suddenly pray, desperate: O Lord don't let me mess this up. This is Your word. Please don't let me mess up. I'm reading for Lessons and Carols, a service where we journey through the story of God's redemptive love in nine Scripture readings and choir music and old hymns. It's the kind of service where you want to leave your mouth hanging open, that God teaches us His story through words, and music, through sound and light and air waves moving back and forth. And somehow, He's given us the chance to tell each other the story again. He's letting His Word go forth from human hands and human mouths and human minds. Because He loves what He has made. Because He became incarnate to live among us. Because He, too, was a human who wrote and thought and spoke.My passage is Isaiah 11. The peace that Christ will bring is foreshown. I stand at the lectern, look at the page, look up at the faces twinkling from the candles lining the aisles.I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and suddenly, I hear His reminder: I make these promises to all my people. You, tonight, are my people. You, tonight, are the messenger for this promise. Won't you tell these bright faces what I have promised them? I begin to read. I feel my voice grow inside my chest as I hear the words echo around and around the wide sanctuary. The candles dance on the altar. Someone opens the back door and I feel the rush of winter wind on my face. And I am struck by this sudden richness, this service of festival and prayer, this journeying even again to Bethlehem at the beginning of Epiphany, the feast of light, to meet the Light.His promises are to all His people. To His people who heard the words of the prophet crying in the wilderness and on the streets and in the temple. To His people in the pew in front of me, with their blue and tan coats and weary faces. To His people who have been scattered across the globe - in poverty and fear, in hunger and thirst, in injustice, in need. To His people who have been grieving. To His people who have lonely hearts. To His people who I know and don't know, who I see every morning in Starbucks but never recognize, and to His people who I have yet to know.These promises I read tonight - these are the light He shines on our path as we journey towards Him. These promises, that one day no one shall kill or destroy on all His holy mountain, that the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the seas:these are for you.He made this promise for you, in this singular, remarkable, irreplaceable way.This is what I hear as I tremble back towards my parents in our pew. This is what I hear as we bend knees and hearts.He made you this promise.Isn't it miraculous, that a love so vast as to cover the earth with the knowledge of the Lord, is also the love that makes you promises of peace and life everlasting?I cry a little on the long drive home. For the bright faces, and the brighter promise.Love,hilary 

the day of the blue moon socks

If you ever wondered what it's like to walk around inside my shoes on a typical day?You go to work in the morning, bleary eyed because you don't get coffee until 7:37 at your Starbucks, the one whose baristas know your name and give you extra tea bags and honey when you're sick and sneezing all over their counter and who sometimes slip an extra shot into your morning latte.You arrive at work, do your thing. A few times during the day you'll put your head in your hands and wonder, why am I doing this? Is this even the place I am supposed to be? You'll eat 7 crackers from the whole gran TLC cracker box, then 7 more, then worry for a few seconds about whether that was the right portion size because it's still January and you might want to make this year the year of food awareness or eating right or something... then you'll forget, and eat another 10 crackers while you type furiously because typing fast makes you feel more productive.You'll drive home. You'll pray out loud as you go, rambling prayers, prayers of woods and left turns where you almost forget to put your blinker on. You'll pray that God explain Himself and His plans. You'll pray to see yourself more truthfully, see others more graciously, see God more clearly. You'll pray some things that go deep into your heart and rest there and others that you forget just as you drive through the intersection before your intersection when you're distracted wondering what Dad is making for dinner.You'll work out to Zumba by yourself in your room on the second floor and occasionally wonder if the floorboards might give under your enthusiasm for "Bollywood style" dance routines. You will wear ballet slippers you got sophomore year of college for the ballet class you took. You'll wear these with socks because the toes on each slipper have worn almost through. You'll have your hair in a sweaty bun and you won't really care that you are shaking all your bedroom furniture to music you wouldn't listen to with your grandmother because no one can see you.And then, oh, and then: then you will walk into the grocery store wearing yoga shorts, red TOMS with "Blue Moon" logo socks, a long wool coat, and a T-shirt. I am not kidding. You'll look down in the vegetable aisle and realize this, realize that your coat length plus shorts plus beer factory souvenir socks your mom bought for you when she visited said factory plus hair in its messy bun = disaster.There you are.There, indeed, I was. Not only did I wear that outfit into a public place, but I proceeded to walk around the grocery store holding, now wait for it:grapefruits, iced tea, toothpaste, granola bars , razorsThis assortment of items practically screamed, "LOOK! LOOK! I'm a twenty something! I live at home! I have no clue what my life holds! I cry in my car sometimes to country music radio!"I thought, this can't get any better. Here I am wearing beer logo socks and yoga shorts, lugging around a bag of grapefruits and new razors, looking for my mother...When of course, it does get better.The cute guy from Driver's Ed several years ago, the one who used to (I think, kind of) flirt with me on occasion under the guise of making fun of me? The one who I proceeded to see whenever I went to the local ice cream store or CVS? Oh yes, friends.He works at this grocery store. He works, in fact, directly in front of the Greek yogurts that I was furtively trying to stash under my chin until I could wobble towards the checkout because I hadn't thought to get a basket or a cart.There was that pause. The, "Oh, CRAP." pause. The pause of does-he-see-me-where-is-the-exit-shoot-he-saw-me-too-late pause. I smiled. He smiled. I moved my hand away from the Chobani yogurt. He took in my outfit, my arms full of groceries, said a vague "hey, good to see you," and went back to unpacking boxes.There are these days. These days of blue moon socks and counting TLC crackers in your office. These days of not enough pretty words shared or said to you and by you, and these days of yoga shorts and old ballet slippers and Zumba in your room to a YouTube video and buying grapefruits. Wearing TOMS. With socks. With a long coat and shorts. And the cute guy looking you up and down like he has never seen anything like it (probably true).And you know what? I love these days. They're what make us real. They're what make us gracious, graceful. They're what make us loveable.Love,hilary