when i am listening to coldplay

Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones.  This song is in my top five of all time.If I made you a playlist, sometimes, I wonder what story it would tell of me. I made one, right now, thinking about it, but I don't know what the story is.A story of trying.A story of waiting.A story of belonging, of leaving, thinking myself the one left behind sometimes.But more a story of always being found.--I have a story about this song that I can't quite remember, me standing in the back of a crowded gym after I had graduated from the school I love near my hometown. The a capella group in the school sang it, harmonies built with raw voices, and no one was afraid, and no one's voice trembled. I think it was the time that I was so sure things would not come back together, after a year of the try hard and try even harder life...And then they sang,lights will guide you home. I don't know how to explain this, exactly, but in the quiet tumult of these last weeks and months, I have been listening to it again.lights with guide you home. That's how I want my son's journey into the world to be - lit up, illuminated, glowing with the fierceness of love.That's how I want all of us, the wild and ragged band of us, to journey through the world. I want us to live illuminated.That try-hard life, it feels far from me now. It isn't - I've asked so often for something to do, for an explanation of how I didn't try hard enough, for a list of the should-have-dones, my voice cracks with over-asking. And some days I am heavy with the lie that we earn the life we have, that it is ours to possess, ours to control.The truth is that Jackson belongs to me, but I don't possess him. Jackson's story, Preston's story, my family's stories, they belong in mine, and mine in theirs, but the stories aren't ours, not our creation or our prop or our possession. The world shifts under you when there is a person arriving, a new life, a new wonder... and it all changes again, and you're cradling your belly in front of the bank teller and you realize that you are not the same. That you don't want the life that is hard won or earned - you want the life that is too full to be your doing.You crave the life too full, too good, to graced with God's intimacy, to have been your plan.--I remember that self in the high school gym, her with her try-hard tears and the weight of a world she doesn't quite know yet on her shoulders, heaving them forward. I want to tell her that it will be okay, that she will learn in about two hundred and twenty weeks that she will not want the hard-won trying life anymore. I want to tell her that instead, she should let the words sink into her bones, nestle there. I want to promise that her life will be lit by the fierceness of love.That her husband will love her so much better than the boy who didn't see her.That her son will kick her at the most extraordinarily right times, reminders of his abundant life even in the midst of what shadows, what feels dark.That God will move, and keep moving, calling out from ahead and behind and next to her - Take heart! It is I - do not be afraid. That she will have, not a planned life, not a hard-tried and hard-earned and hard-won life. She will have a life softened and lit by love.--Lights will guide you home,and ignite your bonesThis time, I sing it softer. A lullaby. A reminder. A single, glimmering hope.Love,hilary

when it has been 20 weeks

Dear Jackson,You have a name! You love to remind us with every ultrasound visit that you are a boy, and the name belongs to you in the best way - it's been yours for so long. I love using it when we're on the go, you and I, grading papers or dancing in the kitchen or sitting on the porch, just being. I love talking to you with your name, Jackson, rolling off my tongue.This week we learned a little bit more about you, Jackson. We learned different things from different places - a phone call and a follow-up detailed ultrasound and a genetic counseling appointment. It's been a lot, but I think you probably know and feel my hand over the place where you're moving, that sense of change in the air, new plans, new preparations.You've got a facial cleft. From what we have learned so far, it extends up from your lip and involves your right eye and that side of your nose, and it goes back into your palate too. It happens sometimes; our bodies do unexpected things.You have some unique things ahead, Jackson. We are so grateful that we know now, when you're still wiggling around showing off your arms and legs, letting us hear your strong heartbeat. We are grateful because we can start to make sure we are ready to take care of you when we finally meet you this fall. And every single person who comes into the world needs taking care of. Me, your dad, the people who will meet you and take care of you in the hospital in September, the people at church, your grandparents. You will need some particular things - you'll need help eating, maybe with breathing at the beginning, and the doctors will do some really amazing things to help you with the cleft so that you can grow, grow, grow - so that you can become your full Jackson self. But everyone needs. Everyone has scars that help tell the stories of their lives - I am praying that you become proud of yours, even as I am proud of where they come from, proud of your mighty self here at 20 weeks, proud of you.Listen to me, my beloved first son: you have been befriended by the Almighty God. God is walking into every room, every waiting area, every surgery, every MRI or ultrasound or counseling appointment or wellness check, ahead of the three of us in the wild journey of becoming the family that we could not be without you. God is walking out ahead of us, and whenever we look around at the waves or the walls or the unknown-ness of it, when we cry out or you cry out, I want you to hear me: Jesus immediately calls back to us, "Take heart, it is I! Do not be afraid." Do not be afraid of needing help in the beginning. Do not be afraid of what could happen. Do not be afraid, he whispers to me as I look at your ultrasounds on the fridge -  do not be afraid of the many statistics that cannot add up to the story of your one impossibly precious life.So, Jackson, you whose name means God has been gracious, and whose middle name, David, means beloved, friend. At this the end of our twentieth week together, I put my hand over you and feel you push back at me, defiant already, sure of your own becoming, and we are making our hearts ready for you. We are making our hearts ready for the bigger wonder of who you are - the wonder of taking care of you, of learning your favorite things, of your discovery of the world.We can't wait for you to be here with us, Jackson. We can't wait to hold you and kiss all these places that bear the marks of being human, of being alive. I can't wait to meet you. Every piece of you.All my love,mom

i pray you have a wilder imagination

Dear tiny person, 17 weeks alive now,You will start hearing my voice soon - the sound of my heartbeat, loud and steady, the movement and rhythm of my body in the midst of all the ordinary work of these spring days. And you'll hear Dad's voice, the voices of the people around us, the noises of this life you're coming into.I have been hearing a lot of questions about you. People ask me, "but how will you still be a student?" and "will you quit school?" and "aren't you going to need more time off?" and when I say no, they look at me surprised, a little concerned, a little knowing. They let the silence hang between us, the wide-eyed looks that carry the message across the inches of dusty floor - surely, surely, you didn't think all this was possible. haven't you underestimated how hard it will be? I am praying that you never hear these questions from me.I am praying that when your dad and I hold you, we tell you the stories, again and again, that we are a people who never underestimate anything but the power of the Lord Jesus to walk into our lives and unfold the most surprising, most marvelous, most extraordinary things.Your life is the gift that your dad and I never imagined we would be so privileged to see so soon. Your life is the greatest gift God has given us.I pray that I do not ask you questions that say your imagination is too unrealistic. That you can't possibly think you can do this and that at the same time, that you are underestimating how hard it will be, how much work it will be, how likely it is to fall apart.I pray that you will hear me say instead that our imaginations should be wider, and wilder. I pray you will hear what I know in my bones, that we too often live limited lives because we limit our imaginations. We think that motherhood and philosophy graduate seminars can't possibly both be successful; we think that you must choose between art and biology; we think that you cannot travel AND or be married AND or work this challenging job AND or ...and we teach this to each other, with our well-meaning questions and our expectant looks, with our heartfelt, "but how will that work?" Our imaginations grow small in the shadow of what we think more realistic.I pray that your imagination is wilder than that. I pray that you hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, who will call you to get out of the boat, to leave behind what you know, to go into towns and cities, to leave the empty tomb with just the wild hope and these words: "I have seen the Lord!"I pray you know that this is enough reason to rejoice in even what seems difficult or strange in the eyes of the world. It might not satisfy other people. And right now when I put my hand over the place where I know you're growing, and I tell those who ask me these questions that I am not afraid to be a student and a mother, to be a wife and a philosopher and to hold you in the long nights and read to you about epistemology and the Rainbow Fish -when I do this, it probably doesn't satisfy the person who asked me.But if it does not - if the question still lingers, how can she think all this is possible, then I dare them all to take that question and place it before the Lord Jesus. I believe Jesus will widen their imagination. I believe that Jesus will remind them of the stories:Abraham, who left everything he knew to follow God,Moses and the people of Israel, who followed God into the water of the Red Sea and walked safely,Ruth, who left everything she knew to go with Naomi,Hannah, who did not leave God alone in praying for her son,Mary, who gave birth to God Himself in Jesus,Peter, who got out of the boat, and even when he doubted, cried out and Jesus saved him immediately,of the people Jesus healed, and ate with, whose faith, whose wild imagination carried them into the very heart of God.And I believe that you, and me, and Dad, we are one story numbered among the thousands that Jesus tells about those who love Him. They are all stories of wilder imagination. They are stories of people who love, and this love, it casts out their fears, their idea of limits, their idea of what will be too hard and too much and so hard to imagine how it will all work. And so, beautiful, breathtaking tiny human being listening to my heartbeat, I pray that you are filled up all these many years with a wild imagination. I pray that you feel these stories around you, in your bones. I pray that you know most of all that God loves you, wildly, beyond your imagining - and when God calls out to you, you need never fear - it is His love, calling you to Himself.Love,mom

love is the unrelenting muscle

By now maybe you've heard through a grapevine or around the web, the news that Preston and I are expecting a baby. I had thought years ago I would do a lot of blogging about becoming a mom when it happened, that I would want to catalog my daily questions and thoughts in the midst of all the changes and strange cravings and morning sickness, the moments of realization, the moments of gratitude.I don't, anymore. It seems a season for quiet, for listening close, for making silence, as we used to tell my Sunday School students. Becoming a mom is among the most wondrous things that has happened in my life - but I probably won't say too much about it here.But I want to tell you about the sound.I want to tell you about the sound of his or her heartbeat, at 9 weeks, in an ordinary doctor's office on an ordinary Friday, trying to lie still as my nurse practitioner moved the Doppler monitor below my belly button. At first it was just the sounds of searching out the little life that I've been taking on faith is growing inside me, but then.Then, there is this sound, this unbelievable, unyielding, steadying heartbeat. And it isn't my heartbeat. It's hers, or it's his. It's the baby's heart, beating away.The heart is the most unrelenting muscle I have ever heard. The heart is the muscle that begins its work and does not cease, not for one moment. And it begins first. It's already beating as the brain grows and takes shape, begins to assemble thoughts still as mysterious as whatever lies on the other side of this thin place, where heaven and earth are tremblingly close to each other.The heart, beating. It sounds so ordinary and then it sounds so unbelievable. Her heart has been beating for weeks now, without me knowing. His heart began to beat before I knew it, before we tuned in with the monitors and the watches and the steady checking in of doctor's offices.And this matters to you, because your heart, your faithful, steady, unrelenting muscle has been beating in you for longer than you can imagine. It has kept you.I think about how we connect the heart, not the brain, with love. I think how we talk about the heart of God, not the cerebral cortex. And though God is far beyond any attempt to imagine Him having a literal heart, I do not think that we are completely wrong to imagine ourselves, to imagine this world, as in the heart of God.Because God's love is the same unyielding, unrelenting, steadfast muscle. God's love is the patient, ever-present sound echoing through our bodies and our lives. God's love is not too tired to carry us. God's love is the unrelenting muscle that carries us.And this baby, he or she is reminding me that there is something not to be forgotten about the mystery of a heartbeat. About the mystery of how we say that we are close to God, that we are held in His heart, that God loves us.Because love is found in the unrelenting muscle of our lives. And we must love this way: unyieldingly, mysteriously, beginning from before we know it or decide it and continuing long after we think we have done enough, that we are satisfied, that the other person does not love us back or we have given too much of ourselves. We should love this way because it is costly but it is freeing, because it is difficult but familiar, because it is unlike anything in the world and yet it is the foundation of the world.We should love one another this way, because this is how God loves.This baby, he or she has a heartbeat set in motion by God. And this heartbeat, which is different from mine, is teaching me to love again more wild, more free, more unrelenting. Like a heartbeat.Love,hilary

the impossible brightness, again

"It is not the critic who counts." Almost a year ago, I wrote a letter on my blog about that. I was talking about the cocoon we spin around ourselves, one that is supposed to protect us from things failing or falling apart or changing uncontrollably. I was talking about loving, daring greatly, how in that work and wonder the critic in us, the cocoon-spinner, does not count.Far beyond romantic love, I spin cocoons of protection around every paper, every possible declined application, every possible mistake, every possibly possible ... you understand, I think. I spin cocoons of anonymity and safety, of carefully worded posts or no posts at all, of endless caveats of when I become more of ... then, I will do and be and think the braver things.But daring greatly is not about the someday marvelous thing we might do. It is not the moment we suddenly defy ourselves and our cocoons and spite the critic in us. Those are marvelous moments, yes, but they are not all there is to daring greatly.Daring greatly is believing that you carry in you the impossibly bright love of God. It is about entering into the impossible brightness that God prepared for us before we did any marvelous daring thing. It is in all of our tiny revelations, our smallest moments. Daring greatly is saying, "I need to talk to you about this," three fourths of the way through the long flight when you've already argued and made peace and you think, if I say it now I will surely ruin everything. Daring greatly is pressing the "send" button when you're so sure that if I send that, it will be rejected. Daring greatly is getting on your knees when you think every trace of God's calling and purpose has disappeared, and even then, saying, Our Father. And it's showing ourselves to care too much, to be un-aloof and earnest and eager and people of a brighter believing:it's doing the dishes and trying to find the Chinese restaurant in the unfamiliar town so you can do something spontaneous for someone you love, it's making and remaking the same plans as you learn the rhythm of a friend's heart, and it's helping on a logic problem even though you could say you don't have time,it's praying with, not just for, it's being unembarrassed in the restaurant or the bank or the escalator in the mall to pray blessing over the stranger in the grey flannel two steps up from you,it's admitting that we are lights in the world, even in our yoga pants during rainy Mondays when we feel the least influential, admitting that we are lights that God would have put on a lampstand to illumine the house long before we ever thought ourselves worthy.Because love is impossibly bright, and it is already alive in us. Because Jesus has gifted us His brightness, not for ourselves but for the house, for the stranger who knocks on the door, for another's stepping toward Jesus.Daring greatly is not just for the marvelous things that defy gravity - it is for the every day revealing and sharing of ourselves as bearers of the impossible brightness of God's love.That is the impossible brightness. That is daring greatly.Love,hilary

when this is the seventh month of gratitude

I promised a long while ago that I would keep up this accounting of gratitude for marriage, for the spin of our ordinary days, for the way you learn to move, two by two, day by day, in the quiet and the loud and the in between. I promised myself, maybe in some way I promised this blog, this space I keep carving in, bit by bit, marking where I am and where God is.We've been married almost eight months.When I say that it sounds long and short. It sounds like newlyweds and it feels like we've been married forever, we've always been here, always been rounding another bend of time. I forget to be faithful with the laundry. I get mad at myself which makes me avoid it even more, til there are two laundry baskets and a hamper full of things quietly asking for my attention, for my simple act of caring for the space we share and the work we take on, two by two. And it's so gentle, this forgetfulness, that it makes me so angry I'll pick a fight over something completely unrelated because I have this idea of what kind of person I should be in a marriage, what kind of house I should keep, what kinds of things I should do and say and feel and think...I get mad about the laundry. That's the truth in this seventh month, and the gratitude is as simple as that: he waits for me.He waits for me through the rage portion, the avoiding eye contact and getting eerily quiet portion. He waits for me to lose my temper and then go silently inside myself to find it again. He waits even when his hands are full of dishes. When we have only 10 minutes to get somewhere and we are already behind. He waits.And in waiting, he keeps his heart open to me. He waits for me to find the words, to find the thread, to walk my way back from the edge of cliff or from the confusion or the silence.Marriage is the fullest kind of mirror. It shows the ways that you're loved right in the midst of showing you all the things you really do and say and think. It reveals and it redeems. Marriage calls you out of your secret, silent heart and into that hallowed space where your belonging sings in your bones. In this, the seventh month, where I know I've gotten mad about laundry or sad about not going on a walk every day or worried about absolutely everything for no good reason... in this seventh month I can list for you all of those things, but what I know most deeply is just this:The love of my life will stay at the sink with the dishes undone or sit in the car when we're already late or hold me in our living room with all that unfolded laundry, and all the while, he is teaching me that love is patient.I'm grateful for this: that the love of my life waits for me, especially now that we're always around each other, always nearby, always close. He still waits. And that waiting is a great gift.Love,hilary

when I am learning to worry heaven (on prayer)

We have been worrying heaven on your behalf!

She says this laughing from the pulpit, voice bright with the joy of a Sunday morning, and the congregation shouts sings nods claps its approval, its affirmation. We have been worrying heaven on your behalf. We have been up at night and during the day, in the midst of our praising and our praying, telling heaven about you, reminding heaven about you, worrying heaven for you.How long has it been since I worried heaven for another person?How long since I got on my knees, face to the floor, or prayed loud in the car or on a run, how long since I was bold enough to declare that my words spoken in the name of Jesus have power? That when I'm talking to the Almighty, I believe that the Almighty is listening, is hearing, is attending to me?Have we forgotten what it means to pray? Have I forgotten in my desire to make sure I'm contemplating the right issue or the right person or the right non-self-centered words, have I forgotten that Jesus gave me power to worry heaven for another human person?I think about the faithful who wouldn't let God alone, the widow who pursues the judge, the men who carry their brother to Jesus and lower him through the roof, the disciples who panic and cry out on the water, the crowds who clamor for loaves and fishes, the Israelites who wander and persist and insist with God that God has cut a covenant and God must keep it.Why am I so timid when it comes to praying? I don't want to sound like I want something too much or like I wouldn't be happy if God gave me something else? I don't want to be a bother, I don't want to overstay my welcome in the family?But this is what the word of God says in the stillness of my heart when I stop long enough: you cannot overstay your welcome in this family. --We have been worrying heaven on your behalf!The courage it takes, to come bold before the throne, to come as our fullest selves, selves that persist and insist and come back again and again with the same prayers: safety for this person and life for this one, hope and patience and a new job and the truth to come out and a smoother transition and the thing that they really need.I want to pray like that again.I want to make my home in the tangled knot of the family of God, where we cannot overstay our welcome, where we cannot pray too much. I want to worry heaven for the ones I love.--I've been trying to write this blog post for weeks, and I couldn't find the words. I've been sitting at the computer, waiting, and the words haven't arrived. But the other morning, while Preston made coffee and I put off getting out of bed for as long as possible, I heard it: why are you waiting for the right words? The Spirit will teach you to pray. Perhaps I waited so long to write this blog post because I was hoping I could write it about how great this new way of praying is, and how much I have become good at it. And, of course, God hears that too.I don't know how to worry heaven or how to pray with a wild, relentless confidence. But the Spirit will teach me, will teach us.So, courage or not, confidence or not, today I am on my knees, learning to worry heaven. And falling deeper in love with Jesus, who teaches me how.Love,hilary

dear hilary: when you go into the woods

Dear Hilary,My question for you. I have been living in Norway for the past 4 months. I was asked to intern at a church here for 9 months, and I thought the opportunity was exactly what I had been wanting. I completed a ministry school, interned as a small group leader for a ministry school, traveled to France, Haiti and Israel and felt that I was called to the nations. With that being said, since being here there has been unexpected circumstances which lead me to feel so discouraged and confused. My heart longs to return home, and yet there is a fear of simply choosing what is comfortable rather than what is best. Currently what I had thought I would be doing I am not. My heart is aching to do what I love, and yet I feel almost stuck. I am wanting to pursue what is on His heart for me, and I feel unsure of where I am suppose to go from here. I am choosing to live present and make the most of every opportunity by serving, and doing the best with I am given but I find myself again feeling I am not doing what I truly want.Love,Feeling UnsureDear Feeling Unsure,Have you ever seen Into the Woods? The Sondheim musical, that is - there's a recent movie too, but for the purpose of this letter I'm thinking particularly of the original musical. I watched it a little while ago, and I have been thinking, and singing the soundtrack, for weeks now. And it's not a devotional in the traditional sense and it's not a Bible verse, but I can't stop thinking about it when I think about your letter.There is this song, full of things I'm not sure about, about wishes and making our own right and good, but the refrain, it's the refrain -no one is alone, truly, no one is alone.We often ask God for direction and guidance. We often crave a map, a path, a bit of light on the way. I spent months praying every day for clarity about life after college and months praying for a boy to fall in love with me when all I found was uncertainty. I spent my heart asking, asking, asking, for the clarity. For the suredness to come back (had I ever had it before?), for my way to be obvious. For the feeling in the pit of my gut that said, not this, or maybe this or worse still, I don't even know how to decide if this or if not ... to disappear.I got on the floor of my bathroom the other night while my husband made us dinner while he sang praise songs. I got on the floor and wept for no other reason than life is still confusing and I am in the woods with you, somewhere I'm not sure of, somewhere new. All after the clear calling to grad school and marriage, all after the work of it and the months of being in it and becoming familiar and even after there has been so much that has felt sure.And everywhere, there is someone who went into the woods, like you, trusting the One who calls and who now sits on her bathroom floor or in his car with the engine running, and everywhere there is a fighting to believe it: you are not alone. Truly. No one is alone. You aren't failing or falling short because your heart hurts for home. You didn't mishear a good calling, or make a wrong turn, or disappoint anyone. Hurting for home, for the familiar, for the certain path, is part of how we are made and remade and sanctified, yes, even this longing is caught up in that greater work.If you go home tomorrow, if you stay for ten years, if you long every day to go home but stay, or if you find the hurt leaves you for a little while - these are not the markers of being in the will of God. Nor are they the marker of pleasing God or living out a calling.Those things you are already doing because you are in the woods calling out for Jesus. For what is it that we are made for but to learn endlessly how deep and wide the love of Jesus, that it is finally, irrevocably true: you are not alone. Truly. You are calling out in the woods, and many miles from you, I'm doing the same, and there are thousands of us calling out, and this is the fullness of every calling: to call out for the Lord in the middle of the woods and to become more and more and more fully assured of Jesus. Believe me, Jesus hears you, loves you, and is in the middle of the woods with you.You have already done so much that is brave and breathtaking. Trust now that you can pause and ache and wonder, and go where you go, and all the while, you are not alone. Jesus goes into the woods with you, and even now, He is near.Love,hilary

tonight, welcome the wonder

Dear friend,There is a scene in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead I want to remember with you.

After a while the baby cupped her hands and poured water on her mother's arm and laughed, so her mother cupped her hands and poured water on the baby's belly, and the baby laughed... The baby made a conversational sound and her mother said, 'That's a leaf. A leaf off a tree. Leaf,' and gave it into the baby's hand. And the sun was shining as well as it could onto that shadowy river, a good part of the shine being caught in the trees...After a while we went on back to the car and came home. Glory said, 'I do not understand one thing in this world. Not one.'

I can't read this without tearing up. That sunshine and the shadowy river, the baby laughing, the leaf and the ordinary unconscious teaching of the wonder of the world, in a muddy bit of a river in Iowa. How can I not cry? That sunshine. That teaching. That wonder.--It's the day before Christmas, and I am caught up in the ordinary wonder of today. There is sunshine through trees, and my father-in-law and I spent a morning drinking coffee and looking out big bay windows and talking, our minds wandering new and familiar paths and it is that, the making of memories of laughter and wisdom shared and questions asked, in the unhurried way of daily life - that is the wonder of Christmas. That is the wonder we are welcoming in this moment, in this night. We welcome the wonder of new life, Heaven colliding irrevocably with earth. We welcome a baby, who bears our flesh, our ordinary, who is now in the midst of us and among us and in us.How can I not cry? We welcome the wonder of all wonders. Not apart from the ordinary, but entering the heart of it.--I sing Christmas carols around the house when I clean these days. I don't notice it all the time, but then suddenly I do: the same wonder, the rhythm of the cleaning of the floors and of my heart, too. I sing Christmas carols loudly and without worrying about managing all the right notes in the original key. I sing these stories loud. Something about the soapy water and the quiet and the ordinary work that never ceases: this is the work of wonder. The task of it, to repeat it in the midst of everything.--Tonight, we welcome the wonder of all wonders, the Lord of Heaven come to earth. We do this work of welcome in the middle of being so very much ourselves. I am myself, 24 years old, young in marriage and love and wisdom, me, the desperate seeker of a wilder love. I am welcoming Jesus as me, because Jesus comes for me. I am welcoming Jesus in the midst of my ordinary, singing Christmas carols with the Swiffer in hand. I am welcoming Jesus crying over Gilead. In the heart of the ordinary, the extraordinary enters in.Come with me even unto Bethlehem? Bring your ordinary, your uncertainty, your wearied heart and hands and self? Even unto Bethlehem?Tonight, the wonder of all wonders is born. Come with me, and greet Him?Love,hilary

when I choose the economy of God

"So, I guess you're going to have to figure out three things."This is my husband, in the still, dark room where we sit and write with the rain outside and the quiet inside. He's talking about gratitude, something I'm resisting, and I don't have a good reason, I should tell you that right now.Actually, I should tell you that I have some bad reasons.In the economy of an anxious heart, your minus columns are always outlasting your positive ones. In the economy of a perfectionist heart, a minor dip in expected performance is the 1929 crash of Wall Street. A lower grade than you expected of yourself or a missed opportunity to make friends with someone or some nice thing you can't quite put your finger on but you're sure you failed to do. You name it for yourself and suddenly it is another thing you've forgotten, and you work and live on an ever steepening incline of failure, and somewhere along the way you're also drowning in your own misunderstanding of yourself, and you've mixed your metaphors together so you are a drowning person climbing a mountain with a top you can't reach, pushing a rock maybe, like Sisyphus, or maybe just pushing yourself, hauling yourself up and up and up and already you are sure you have been defeated.That's me sometimes. I don't know if it's ever you, but it is me. It is me when the grades and the papers and the research ideas come back with critique or comment or areas for improvement. It is me in the quiet fights and the loud ones. It is me lying in bed on a random Saturday morning cataloguing the friends I haven't caught up with lately or the places I have not brought peace or the way I should have and could have and would have been a better me.--The economy of God looks nothing like the economy of my anxious heart.The economy of God is God coming towards us, promising abundant generosity for the laborers who work an hour and those who work a full day. It is a strange, terrifying generosity, the kind that makes my neat columns of deserving and undeserving and the weight and sift of my measurements look foolish. The kind that puts us to shame in our race to merit and earn, but rescues us in the midst of it too. God laughs, I imagine, and sets us free.--Once my counselor asked me what the big bad was that would happen if I didn't win. If I didn't get perfect grades or perfect GRE scores or a perfect record of performances. I still don't know the answer to that question. I think that was her point.--I want the economy of God. I want the economy of generosity, the economy of grace. I want the rescue from drowning my way up a mountain I can't ever finish climbing, the setting free. I want the economy that will force me to give up my pride in making each and every thing perfect, my disappointment at myself when things aren't just as I would like them. I want Jesus, in the end, whatever it might cost me and my well-worn anxious heartbeat.And so I do have to figure out three things, write a story that is full of the richness of a generosity I didn't earn, full of receiving blessing where I can't say my goodness or my rightness is the reason, but the only reason is the sufficient reason is that God loves. That's the new story. God loves, and the richness of the story is there. I'm caught up into it, and set free by it, and this is the better story.Preston asked me for three things. I won't tell you what they are, but I'm thinking I might keep a journal somewhere, and start writing them down.And so in a little way, widen my welcome of the most wondrous love.Love,hilary

dear hilary: if the impossible is true

Dear Hilary,I'm learning a lot about probabilities right now, and how to apply them. I'm learning that there are high probabilities for some things and low ones for others, based on evidence, based on prior ideas or beliefs, based on... you name it.What if there is no probability for something? What if there is no probability that God is real, the way you talk about God? Is trusting in something that isn't really trustworthy is a bad idea?Love,ProbablyDear Probably,I have a high probability for believing that I am sitting in my apartment typing this to you. I have a low probability for believing I am a brain in a vat, or secretly a monkey typing on a typewriter into infinity. I suppose lots of things are possible, but they have low probability.Honestly, though, what a curious idea - that you would measure belief by something like probability, up and weigh and judge things by how rational they are and seem. It's not a bad way of going on for some things, but it isn't the only way we measure belief. It isn't the only way we measure familiarity or trustworthiness.So maybe I wonder whether the probability of me being a brain in a vat or being a monkey typing on a typewriter to achieve Shakespeare's Hamlet is really in the end the best way to think about your questions about God.The Incarnation kind of messes around with all our probability.What is that line, from the L'Engle poem? Had Mary been filled with reason, there'd have been no room for the Child.Probability is a way of filling the room, the paper, the equation, with reason. And sometimes, when you're filled up with reason, there is no room for the Child. There is no room for the Incarnation in its particular, improbable, unyieldingly unlikely way, to live in your heart.I'm just now learning a lot about probability and probability calculus. I'm learning about how much we trust something based on what appears to us to be true or on what an authority says versus what we see, or think we see...There is a beauty to what it can show you about how you think. There is a goodness and a truth to it, too. But there is this resistant, stubborn part of my heart, or maybe the whole of my heart, that says even when it is good and helpful, it's not everything.The improbable is sometimes remarkably true. And our measure of believing in that improbable truth can't be contained in the neat lines of a pencil on a calculus problem on graph paper.Had Mary been filled with reason. Maybe this is a post about reasonable-ness, that elusive thing we so often want to defend us. We want to be justified in being angry and hurt and confused when something happens, or being elated and grateful and full of joy. We want reasonableness to keep us on the straight and narrow, give us the right opinions, protect us from being fools or from being in error. We want a hedge of protection around the happenings of the world.There'd had been no room for the Child.And isn't it the Child, after all, that we should stretch enough to make room for?And isn't it the Child, after all, that makes room for us?I want to tell you, young philosopher in the making, you who seek the probability, the justified and justifiable reasons, and even you, who might be reading this, who think that the best thing is the most probable thing -Welcome the wonder of the impossible: the Lord, come among us as a child.Let us make room.Love,hilary

Jesus is journeying toward us

It's hard to believe it's already the second week of Advent, isn't it?Hard to believe that we're already such a ways along in the journey towards Bethlehem, towards Jesus.This year I realized something new: Jesus is coming for me. Jesus, the King, is coming into the world, into the mess and beauty and hope of the world, for me. For my heart, for my always anxious always joyful heart, for my whole self. Jesus is coming towards me.We spend a lot of time in Advent talking about our journey to the manger. We're like the wise men following a star, we're like the shepherds following the words of an angel, we're like Mary and Joseph, even, riding on the back of a donkey and walking beside it, when the whole land is to be registered.But have we forgotten, in our Advent calendars and moving wooden animals and counting down days and lighting candles that it is Jesus who is coming to us?I so often want to cast myself in the role of the person in the story who climbed up the tree to get a better look, who declared allegiance well before it was popular or easy, who stayed faithful to the end, who went out looking for the Savior and who found him.But the truth is, most of the time, I am standing still, and it is God who comes out looking for me. It is God who leaves behind everything to catch everything back up into Himself. It is God who promises salvation and then comes to us bringing it. One of my favorite eucharistic hymns - and with blessing in his hands, Christ our God to earth, descendeth, our full homage to demand. We cry out, Come, Lord Jesus but sometimes we are so anxious to be seen as the ones running towards him that we forget our helplessness, our wandering in darkness, our on us light has shined. Not our own light, not light we went out and found and sought and made for ourselves, but the light that comes from beyond us is the light that is coming. That is the light that we have been gifted this Advent.I am standing still, in the thousand thousand winds of God's coming, and I wish I was one of the angels one of the shepherds one of the wise men one of the righteous one of the wisest one of the enlightened. I wish to be the one who recognizes the movement in the air and who goes after God running.But I couldn't, and the stories should be told no less honestly than this: when I could not move at all, Jesus came. When I couldn't take off running for God, Jesus came running for me.And when even my bones did not know how to cry out, yet even then did God say, behold my Son. And even in those moments when I get out of the boat, when I see Jesus, when I whisper and hope and pray - then I fear I am sinking, and even then, Jesus immediately - immediately - reaches out to catch me and whispers, you of little faith, why did you doubt? This Advent, can we remember together, the wonder that God is coming for us? That we are the receivers of the light, of the hope, of the great news, that the angels and shepherds and wise men and the sheep and oxen and calves and goats and everything that is in heaven and on earth leaps together in rejoicing -because Jesus is journeying toward us.Love,hilary

when I find dirt on my wedding shoes

I had a plan for my wedding shoes, even before Preston proposed to me. I'd seen them in a magazine the previous Christmas and in so many wedding Pinterest pictures. They were the perfect color pink - ballet pink, the kind that's gentle but strong and not too flashy but not too pale - made of what look like satin ribbons, flat but elegant. I've wanted to be graceful like a ballerina for a long time (far longer than I actually studied ballet, I should admit), and these were the shoes I imagined wearing.They fit perfectly, and I kept them in their box without ever touching them or wearing them. I would show them off in hushed whispers, the tissue paper crinkling, slip them on for no more than ten minutes and always inside. I couldn't imagine ever wearing them anywhere - they were the thing I thought would make me beautiful.--And today I was cleaning our closet on a whim listening to the rain outside and I tried on my wedding shoes again, just to see. I don't know if any of us are very far from thinking beautiful things are magic, and so I stood amid the dust and the old scarves and the sweaters and I slipped them on.They fit perfectly.They're covered in dirt.I began a lament, half-formed the words on my tongue and half whispered them to the mirror, looking up and down and wondering where all this dirt had come from, if I should put them somewhere safer than in the midst of all my other ordinary shoes, as if they should be kept safe from my ordinary life, from my growing self.--But I couldn't stop looking, noticing, and then I realized: the dirt makes them beautiful.The dirt is the witness to the growing of a young marriage, the beginning, the glorious running through the world and the slowing down, the catching each other, the catching ourselves, the being constantly caught up in God. They're bearing the marks of marriage: the almost five months, the honeymoon where we got tattoos and the wandering through the grounds of my high school where we got married, the scuffs of grass from down by the river where we walked in the haze of a Texas summer. I can squint and see the mystery green pen marks I tried to erase with a Tide pen now permanently etched at their edges. They're wearing history now, a bit of rainwater, worn from being stamped in frustration or impatience. And they wear the history of love, how different and the same it is, how easy it is to forget that love is always moving in wild uncontrollable circles, bringing more people in, bringing you closer to the one you love, sealing the ark and the ache of marriage with every click of the lock and every first peek of sun too early in the morning.--We tell ourselves to make memories because time goes too fast, to take pictures, to Skype every detail back home lest we lose sight of who we are or were or could become.But perhaps our lives are already bearing witness to it. Perhaps it is we who are too worried to notice that the rest of our ordinary is holding and bearing to us the story of us, of our marriage and jobs and moves and fights and triumphs. Perhaps our shoes, even those we were so afraid to touch, are beautiful when we let them wear and retell our stories.Perhaps the dirt on my wedding shoes is a better storyteller of this hallowed beginning than I can hope to be.And perhaps, I should stand still in the perfect pink shoes now flecked grey and brown and that funny hint of green in my closet on a Saturday and listen.The story they tell is so beautiful.Love,hilary

dear hilary: when strength is hard-fought

Dear Hilary,He hurts. I hurt. We play the game of who cares less: He is winning because I care too much, invest my heart too quickly. Still I do not tell a soul. I wrestle with sexuality, faith, self-respect - aware that this is unhealthy. I cannot fix him, I know. And I too walk through a season of brokenness and loneliness - I am not strong enough. Tonight I ache and before I know it, I have spilled my tears and confusion and fear all over the passenger seat of my friends car. He pieces the story together and asks me if I want his advice. I nod and he tells me that I need to get out of this relationship, that I am too good for him, that he does not want to me get more hurt than I already am - that my no will hurt him, anger him, alter the relationship, but in the end, he will respect me for it. Alone in my room, I absorb his honest words. I think about what it means to respect self, declare that you are worth more than being used. I think about how it is foolish to expect that I can fix other people or be their saviour, and I know they cannot be mine either. Because the broken cannot fix the broken as the blind cannot lead the blind.Yet still I think of his arms around me. I fear that I am not strong enough to respect myself.Love,sexuality, emotions & other dangerous thingsDear Dangerous Things,I was in France my freshman year of high school when I learned the word for wound in French: blessure. We were talking about the Normandy Beaches, about D-Day. When I think about things that hurt, when I think about things that ache, for some reason I go right back to the hallway just by the gift shop in some small museum in Normandy where my teacher taught us the word for wound. Une blessure. I've since looked it up, and in the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the entry for the word "bless" is this idea - to wound or to hurt. It's from the Old French and the French. I don't know how often we use it, or if anyone uses it at all these days. But it is there, in its quiet catalogued home, and when I read your letter for some reason I went back and looked at it again.You have been blessed in just this way - injured. And your letter speaks that out and it is worth attending to. I am not anxious to speak the other meaning of the same word - the meaning that has to do with abundance, with gift, with praise, with being given a blessing. I think perhaps there will be a moment when this one blessing becomes the other, but that's not for me to say.It's just for me to say that your strength does not depend on not having been wounded. Your strength does not depend on you being in top shape all the time. Strength is a mysterious thing. You have it by clinging to it. You have it by insisting on it, daily, in the small ways. You have it not by already having it, not by being without une blessure or even more than one, but by the taking of those things into yourself.I encourage you think deeply about the conversation you had with your friend. I encourage you to attend to the parts of it that perhaps feel most wounding: that your friend has said you should alter the relationship. That your friend has said you will be more hurt by continuing. That your friend, whatever else has happened, whatever wounds live there, is telling you to go.That conversation hurts, but I think it is its hurting, its clear-sighted pain, is the strength. Because you will not have strength to go before you go, and there will be no magical moment where you wake up and the wounds have disappeared.So do not wait. Strength to go will follow your leaving. The healing will follow your binding up of the wounds.I can't know how or when or even if this wound, this blessing, will become the other kind. But I know that you will have strength to go by going, I know that you will find that in the first steps you take out from the space where you are hurting, out from attending to it, clear-sighted, there strength will meet you.For I believe that God's gesture to us is one of constant coming near. Nadia Bolz-Weber writes that in her book Pastrix - I remember underlining it over and over and over. "God is always coming near us."God is always coming near you. Constantly. In this, in the first step away, in the before-you-have-strength, in the strengthening, in the aftermath. In the blessing, and the blessing.Love,hilary

when I am keeping a quieter vigil

I have a thousand stories that I haven't told.It's snippets of moments of remembering, the way that our hearts remembering, outside of time, bending it back and forth hoping that the truth of it will illuminate in the quiet, heartfelt, wondering places. Last year I wrote some of the stories down, a flood of remembering, in the way that when something changes you want to put it back together, make it a new story so that you can understand why and how and if it even was the way you thought it would be.I have stories of high school, stories of college and the first floodlit after-years. I have stories about midnight drives through the towns of my childhood and ones about walking the dog on a marsh field with my mother in the cold before winter, thinking about how I never imagined being able to grow up, only to turn around and find that it was happening all along.I have stories about the poems I used to write and the ones I write now, how my poetry is a scattered collection of skeletons, ideas that I love because they show me who I was not so long ago.When I think about blogging (and, dear friends, it's been such a long time since I've written over here), I think of all the stories I've been telling: stories of confirmation and falling in love, stories of Easter vigils and long car rides home, stories of missing my grandmother and letters to others about how to be unafraid of the beautiful monsters in our closets.But today, as I sit in the sunlit corner of the building where I do most of my reading and writing these days, I realize that I am keeping a quieter vigil. These are the days of collecting stories, gathering them around me like echoes of the Psalms, stories to rage and stories to pray, stories of God's wonder and God's silent watchfulness, stories of me, learning and unlearning the world. These are the days when the world lights and darkens, when I watch the fan above the bed in the early morning, when winter is coming, when the seasons gather us on their unrelenting way.I wonder if we are too quick to think all the stories are for the telling of them, and not our own hearing. I wonder if I am too quick to worry that I have been quiet on my blog, that so much has happened in these last few months and I've said so little, my space gathering a bit of gentle dust.And then I wonder if the stories won't be better, when they are told, for having been kept a little longer in a quieter vigil?So, perhaps it is not so terrible that I am gathering the stories in, that I'm out on the plains of my life caught up in the work and worry and awe of living, and perhaps it is, even, a great and mysterious thing to be silent and watch it unfold, so that when I find words for the stories, find movement in my heart to tell them, there will be a richness that might not have been otherwise.In my quieter vigil, I might write here or there, and I'm collecting the stories in notebooks and napkins, and oh, how good it will be to bring them forward in the time that is right. Vigil-keeping, it is a practice, a work, but we are the better for it.I will leave you with this, a bit of what I'm pondering in the back of my notebook, in scribbles and half finished thoughts:The goodness is sitting on a swinging bench. The goodness is next to us, near us in from of us and so why do we cry out except because we hope for more than an intangible idea we hope for a weighty glory of sunlight and dirt and squirrels climbing trees. I am along on this bench writing in my journal which is really a supposedly philosophical notebook and my pen keeps smudging as I go I remember the freewrites and how they must have been more about freedom than writing more about light and air touched and sensed and the scratching pen and distant frisbee thrower and how here in Texas the sky is a different color blue. Here the trees have grateful roots in dry ground, rain is a surprise and so always remains a gift like the freedom in writing. How can we know the world without knowing its beauty? Love,hilary

when no one else can believe it for me

We were back at a church we love this past Sunday. I'm a long-road Anglican, winding my way along a path from childhood and pink dresses at First Communion to that St. Michael and All Angels confirmation, a swirl of the Spirit descending and those words, this is a new anointing, my daughter. This particular church, where the light spills in across the altar, where the choir and the electric organ sing bold to hymn and spiritual alike, where there sits this beautiful banner I stare at every time I go in - yellow, gold, that proclaims: Yours is the glory, Risen Conquering Son. is where I first saw my husband in the midst of being deeply and irrevocably in love with God. This is where I learned that there are ways of being traditional that sing spirituals and pray for the Spirit to come and fall upon us. This is, in short, where I relearned how to encounter the Lord Jesus.On Sunday the pastor preached on fear.On Sunday, Jesus came and sat down beside me.We sat together, my eyes on my hands, hearing what by now feels so familiar - that anxiety is not our nature, that we are fearful from the first moment of disobedience, that perfect love, who is the person of Jesus, casts out fear. And you all know, in your journey with this rambling heart, that I am acquainted with fear. I've lived and wandered inside it often. It's the kind of dark where my eyes adjust quickly, my adrenaline kicks in, I feel my way through the blackness and so often think I'm doing just fine.And you all know that I've been thinking about that a lot. I keep writing about it. I'd say it was some kind of theme or meditation for the season, but I think it's more likely that God is content to dwell with us where our hearts most often go to hide from Him, and so He waits for us, comes out into the dark after us, beckons us into the midst of His very self.So here we are, me and Jesus, and I'm counting the invisible threads in my skirt and I'm hearing again that Jesus will cast out fear, I am hearing that the Holy Spirit lives in me, I am hearing, I am hearing... Jesus, just the stillness of Jesus, is near me.Then the pastor says, "I cannot believe this for you."I bristle at the thought. Aren't we carrying each other? When the road is long and we are weary aren't we leaning hard on the faith of each other, on the promises kept generation to generation, of the stories others tell us when we cannot tell ourselves?But then there is this moment, where I think about it again. I close my eyes, stop counting the threads.Jesus desires relationship with me. Me, without helpful scaffolding or hiding behind the true things someone else has said. And having faith isn't just assenting to what someone smarter has said. Jesus doesn't desire my agreement with someone else. He is too in love with the being of me to want less than my self. My whole self. My whole self, believing.I do believe we should lean on each other. I believe we should carry each other. Oh, but how we must believe this without hiding from the nearness of God to each of us, in the just-us-ness of our being?I told my mother once I was doing something because of the lightness of me. I think God's answer to that question, the one we keep asking, the one we keep hiding from, the one not about God's goodness or qualities or cosmic salvation or any of that, but just the one about how God loves -because of the being of you. Because of the you that is so gorgeously alive. And you are enough of a reason for all the nearness of God. It is our whole self that must believe. It is our whole self, believing, that God is desperately in love with.That kind of love is so particular, no one else can believe it for us. We have to believe it, too.Love,hilary

God is speaking joy

"And I think to myself, how long has God been speaking this joy over my life, and I have been too filled up with anxiety to hear it?"I tell this to her on the phone pacing outside the building where I spend most of my time as a new graduate student. I try to let my feet carry me where they will on the winding paths of campus, past library and other classroom buildings and people on skateboards and scooters, past trendy backpacks and BPA free water bottles.I am relaying a conversation I had with Preston about callings, about anxiety about the future, about what is happening in our lives and what it will mean and how it will happen, and it's in the midst of telling her about the conversation (not even the conversation itself) that I realize it:God has been speaking joy over my life.Anxiety is an unruly substance - it fills up the spaces wherever you let it in. It creeps into the corner of yourself and becomes the drumbeat and gives the marching orders.And I fill myself up with anxiety so much that I cannot hear God speaking. And it is in the very act of resisting anxiety that we will find, that we can hope to find, the ears to hear.Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. Habbakuk, 1.5.When was the last time I was astonished at the Lord? When was the last time I was astounded? When was it that I stopped and marveled and felt my knees go weak from seeing the wonder and the blessedness?When I resist anxiety, even for a moment, I can catch a glimmer of the song God is singing over my life: joy.In resisting the anxiety there is promise, there is purpose, and no, it's not a new life plan with a bigger God stamp on it. It's purpose that is drawing nearer to the Father and purpose that is becoming more like Jesus and it is purpose that will lead you to a new city in a new state in a new marriage so that you might know God better and love him more. The places where we live out our vocation have a tendency to substitute their purposes for the ultimate purpose: we think that we're here to become a certain kind of scholar or a certain kind of teacher or a certain kind of electrical engineer, and that's the real reason God said go. But in that we forget: we forget that Jesus first and always and finally calls us to be a certain kind of human being, one who is made glorious by the Spirit dwelling and moving inside them, one who bears God's image, resplendent, made new, gracious and graceful and alive.Before Preston and I got married, I memorized Romans 8. I don't know why, except for the ways that, daily, I have had to remind myself of it. Remind myself that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Remind myself that you are in the Spirit. Remind myself that those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified. And here again, I remember: nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. In the midst of what is unknown, we are not apart from the love of God. In the midst of what can make us anxious, we are not apart from the love of Christ Jesus. In the midst of hoping and praying and waiting and raging, in the emptiness and the fullness, the silence and the singing, we are not apart from such love.Be astonished! Be astounded! For nothing will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. And thus, rejoice.Love,hilary

i write to keep believing

Someone once told me that my blogging personality was like sweetened, condensed milk. She said it perched on the edge of the swiveling chair just inside the office where I worked. It was late on a Thursday and I was working overtime, filling in for someone on maternity leave, half-distracted, half-exhausted, maybe less than half-hearted. She swiveled, proud of the declaration, or maybe just the uniqueness of her metaphor, I'm not sure which. I must have turned around in an angry kind of way, asked "What?" in that biting tone girls perfect for and against each other, and she stopped twirling, poised to defend her view. "It's not really how it is with you, is it, the stories you tell on your blog? It's just... sweeter."I think tiredness offered me a good reason to accept defeat on the point, so I just nodded and started to close up the office. We didn't talk about it again, but it still lingers, that metaphor, that question - is that really how it is with you - that makes me wonder whether I'm really being honest with anyone who happens to read this. Wonder if, somehow, I'm lying to myself.--Preston, a few years ago - "You have opinions and thoughts. And you should put them out there. Your blog should be a place you explore those things. Edgier." I don't remember the order he said those things, or if he said all of them, or if some are my interpretation mixed with his words mixed with the fog that accompanies memories. I do remember he was Skyping me from his kitchen while he made lunch for a friend of his. I do remember that we were still trying to figure out what being friends would mean to two people who had been so entangled in not-realized-it-yet love letters. I do remember that I was drinking iced green tea with lemon that my mother buys every summer from a plastic cup.I wrote a post in response saying that I couldn't write an edgy post because that wasn't me. Sweetened, condensed milk me.I wonder still whether I should have written about my opinions of education reform.--My counselor and I in a late January evening, the night black and the stars few and far between. Her office is warm and well-light, which makes the night seem blacker as I stare determinedly out the window. "I don't want to talk about it." And her wisdom, always pouring through - "But does anything grow the eating disorder as much as silence? As much as pretending it isn't there?"And so I blog a few posts and whisper in them the fears that feed it, the fears of enough, the fears of how I look and what it means and whether I am beautiful. I don't want to say much more, and I go back week after week saying that I didn't write or I didn't really talk about it, and my counselor, and her wisdom: "But you will know the right places to talk about it, and the right people to talk about it to, won't you?"So I go back to writing about Jesus and the ordinary aches of a heart growing up, I put my one word in front of the other in a steady parade of characters on the screen.--This afternoon, when I've despaired over enough of the workload I have to leave it behind for a few hours, I ask Preston for a writing prompt. He reads me something from Joan Didion, about truth and fact and writing and why she keeps journals and the words dance by me too fast. But I start to think about this blog. Why do I write?I don't write for sweetness. I don't write to make the days drift by in a haze of vague hopefulness or nice feelings.I don't write for edge - I don't think I would even know anymore what that would be, a raw honesty that forgets the truth that spaces are our responsibility, that something belonging to us means we answer for what we bring forth into the world in it.I don't write, even, to keep a journal of what I have and haven't done and accomplished and worked through or where I have or haven't failed or fled.I write, I discover, to keep believing.--I write to fix my hope in the firmness of the Resurrection. I write to hear Jesus calling for me. I write to believe that Jesus is calling for me, to believe that there is a wild calling on my life in the days where I don't believe it. I write so that, in saying it out loud, I can hear it. My heart has a quiet voice sometimes next to the girl in my head with her giant megaphone, and I write to hear over the noise of my life.I write to believe, to keep believing.O Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. I don't think I have ever told anyone that's what I pray most of the time when I sit down to blog.Except, now, you.--I don't remember a word of the Joan Didion quote Preston read me. But maybe the point of it wasn't to remember that, but to remember this: that writing is getting quiet enough to hear and believe in Jesus, writing is making my heart louder than my head. And writing is receiving: grace enough.

along the dark and twisty road

Did you know, that there is such a thing as becoming more confused by your obedience?The things I wish someone had told me.Obey, and the road will get darker and twistier. Obey, and the clarity you prized will vanish. Obey, and the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living will become the prayer for water on a desert highway, the simplest, most desperate question - is there manna for me today, Lord? - with no thoughts of hoarding it or storing it up or anything but the one meal, the daily meal, the crumbs from the table meal.Obey, and that sweet daydream you had about what you would be like and sound like and do, the person you glorified in your mind, you in maxi skirts sweeping through your life with such grace and such ease, she is crying on the couch, yet again, making lists, yet again, asking again for a manna she doesn't know how to find on her own.And you think about how to say it because you think there is nothing more embarrassing than admitting it, that you don't have it together on this dark and twisty road.I keep thinking about Jacob.I keep thinking about all the moments when I have likened myself to Jacob, wrestling, strong, prevailing through the night. I keep thinking about all the times that I have said I have wrestled with God and yet my life is being delivered. Or even because I am wrestling so my life is being delivered.It was night when Jacob wrestled. I never noticed that before.Jacob wrestled until the day broke open.Jacob went out into the dark and twisty night, into the utter unknowing, and wrestled until there was light.I will not let you go unless you bless me. I will not let you go.I am saying this in the dark. I am saying this to a God who I grasp for and hold onto, praying that I have, in fact, found God, that the wrestling is a holding fast, that in the midst of the darkness is the closest kind of encounter.The things I keep inscribing on my heart and the sides of my notebooks during class, that this is the place of closest encounter and Jacob, he walked with an ache in his hip because in the ache is the remembering of how we wrestle with God, all of us, and how in that is the closeness, the hope.I'm out here on the dark and twisty road of obedience, and if you're there, too, then can I whisper a hello, I can see you? And together we will wrestle until day breaks open.Love,hilary

a story about learning

I was on my way out of the classroom on a Thursday when he handed back my paper. In it, he told me he had been honest, as I had asked. And then, as I kicked gravel under my Puma sneakers in the hazy fall sun, I read his comments.

He told me that I was a better writer than what I had produced. That I had, in my gleeful mistaken assumptions about the author, the text, the implications of the words on the page, taken offense to the author of the text. I could have done much better, he wrote. 

I cried about it hysterically on the car ride home, one of those few days when I was picked up alone by my Dad and we got donuts from Dunks on our way back to our old red house, the home of what I thought was my list of ceaseless triumphs. I am a good girl ever being re-formed back into a whole self, and in high school, I ran myself hard in marathons of expectations and disappointments, the weight of each heavy in my heart. 

There is something about being new to graduate school that, if you're new or old there, or new or old in any kind of work, big or small, apparent or hidden, that keeps making me think of that high school version of me. 

I was so unwilling to allow for wrong. I was so unwilling to believe that some things are learned by slow osmosis. By a silence that enters and changes us, by a year upon year returning to the same question the same text the same author the same gracious God who is over and through and in all. No, I would tell myself in the walk between buildings, you must learn immediately and remember forever. You must never make the same mistake twice. You must never relearn something you should have known or were already taught. 

It was true for me in French class, loathing my forgetfulness of the conditionnel passé. It was true in theater, forgetting a line or a gesture that was all-important in the scene that we had already rehearsed. It was true in friendship. It was true in faith. 

So by the time I was a senior hearing my favorite teacher tell me that I was, in fact, a better writer than what I had turned in, I cried hysterically on the way home because his words meant I had to relearn something. I had to go back. I had to try again. I had to revisit something I believed I should have already mastered. And that must mean, I thought, that I was never capable of knowing it at all. That I was never going to be smart enough. That I was never going to see the light or come to a good conclusion or write a better paper. If I couldn't do it perfectly now I could never do it. 

Eventually, I realized God was there. 

I don't mean footsteps, or whispers in fire or rain or wind. I mean the slow awakening, that itself is the result of practice, of grace received, of many mistakes. And ours is not a God who believes in instant mastery. 

There is no lesson that is not to be relearned. There is nothing to be either good at (and capable of) or bad at (and incapable of) in the most important works we do. There is natural gifting, yes, but how gracious and wild and freeing is it that even those with abundant gifts are given the same tasks to work at, again and again? 

That we are all taught to trust God over the whole of life - each season, each event, each uncertainty - and that such relearning is not for the faint of heart only but also for the strong? 

That we are tasked to revise, reimagine, recreate, relearn the most glorious things about God in the most mundane and everyday ways? 

Because there is nothing new under the sun and that makes everything new. 

I can't do it - faith, graduate school, philosophy, creating a family, learning to cook, teaching - any of it, perfectly, and I don't serve a God who sees me as a failed marathon runner in expectation and disappointment. 

I serve a God who retaught His disciples the same things about the kingdom of heaven in many parables. I serve a God who reteaches the people Israel the meaning of trust in Him, in manna, in the stories of Abraham and all the faithful, in the prophets. I serve a God who is unafraid to teach me again the things I couldn't understand, didn't do right or perfectly or well, the first time. 

Maybe in all of us there is a hidden high-school self that is asking us why we can't just wake up and not need to relearn all the things we keep needing to relearn. Maybe in the work you do, wherever you are, there is a self asking why you think you can do it at all since you couldn't the first time, the thirtieth time, the hundredth time. 

To that voice, in as much love as I can muster, I say: there, in the repetition, in the almost-giving-up, is the God who leaves us breathless with how He loves to teach us the same things for the thousandth time. 

We don't need to be afraid to re-learn. 

Love,
hilary