For those who wonder (a five minute post)

It's that time... Five Minute Friday time! Come join us - Lisa-Jo picks the topic, and we let our words fly free like birds over oak trees. It's so much fun, and we would love to have you!

This week is about wonder.

Her face bursts into a grin when I make my smile, eyes scrunched up and nose crinkling in her tiny, perfect face. She wiggles toes and arms and rocks back and forth on her blanket, staring into my eyes like there is nothing else in the world to look at. She is a five month old reminder of the miracles God makes out of the abounding, overflowing love in His heart.

I pick her up and the world dissolves for a few moments in the awe of her - how she is formed, yet her tummy and squirming limbs remind me that she will keep growing, spiraling through years and dresses and putting things in her mouth and laughing, so much of that. But right now, in this moment, in this living room, her parents looking on in the same wonder and amazement, I have eyes only for her.

Because she is the reminder of the wonder - that God loves us each wildly and fiercely, that He delights in our flailing limbs and our first few hesitant rickety steps towards Him. He sees us as those miracle seeds, His children. He sees our stumbling and He holds us tight, just as I hold this little girl and rock her close and feel her little body in my lap. I remember that the wonder keeping the stars in orbit, the wonder of bird nesting in the lilac bush, the wonder of understanding each other, the wonder of meeting someone new who you love, the wonder of this achingly beautiful world is just this: that His love is the single thread running through it.

Love,
Hilary

When God tells you something in your car

I wasn't going to blog today. I wasn't going to put tired fingers to keyboard and bombard you all, dear readers, with more words. Because, quite honestly, my words sound a bit hollow, echo chambers of the things unsaid, and I thought I'd keep quiet today.

But can we ever keep quiet when the words arrive? They choose us for some inscrutable reason we can't possibly understand, and He chooses us, too, to be the vessels of His love. They choose us when we yearn for silence, so that we can sit and look at the sadness in our hands... we don't really want to write about it but we sense that we are supposed to. So here I am, on this blog, this grey misty morning, hoping against hope that the words written are spoken in my heart and yours, that somehow they help. 

I was driving to work this morning, talking my way through a prayer, my voice choked up because yesterday was the day of departure, the goodbye clattering to the floor, looking at me. The countdown of days and hours, mugs of tea and cupcakes, sighs and questions - it's brought us here to today, when your car rounds the corner and I sit in my office, my usual perch, and wonder at the fact that you are gone. And as I rounded corners and listened to the hum of lawnmowers and the thud of newspapers on front porches, I knew He was praying through me, this rambling prayer and realization:

I spend too much time in the glamour of doubt.

I linger in the corridors of questions I know the answers to: I know how He loves me, how He has whispered and waited and rejoiced over me. I know His existence like I know why the surface tension of water molecules makes raindrops circular; mysterious certainty. This is how I know that we will remain close - with the same mysterious certainty. But I lurk, tracing my fingers over the doorknobs and windowsills, peering in to see what it might be like to be uncertain and curious, to wonder, to search for ultimate meaning with the real possibility of finding a new answer, or a different Person. I draw through the dust on the windows the idea that maybe it won't work, and we will unravel, the years of mentoring and boys and questions and silence and growing will unweave as we put distance between us. I lean against the walls and imagine that doubt is a glamourous occupation (even as Melville spins it in Moby Dick).

But what I need is the dirt of obedience. I need to kneel next to rows of newly planted corn stalks and bean sprouts and the creeping branches of strawberry plants, hands in the dirt, packing soil around each tender new seedling. The Gardener looks at me, shaking His head. I can hear Him say, "How long, little one? How long will I need to come fetch you out of your whirlwind, out of your anxious spinning? Can't you see how much there is to do here? Get in the dirt and plant with Me. Don't you see how I long for you to help Me?"

For the first time, I see it: how trusting Him with my heart is like trusting the gardener with his saplings. How I could still, even though doubting seems smarter, more prudent... I could still give my heart over to the dirt of obedience. I could dig my hands into the soil and plant trust and hope and love in rows like lettuces. I could trust Him when He tells me that you love this web of time and trust we are building, just as I love it, and that He is guardian and protector of us both.

Do you ever realize that God's talking to you, only to then realize it's the same conversation the two of You have always been having? You've tuned in and out, wandered through corridors where you can't hear Him, but He's always been talking to you? And today I hear that same refrain: "How long, little one, will you hold your heart away from Me? How long, little one, will you wait before you come running back to Me?"

Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda keep asking and sounding their questions and answers in my heart, and somehow they are reminding me that even our wildest dreams are planted in the dirt of obedience. Mary Oliver asks:

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

And Pablo Neruda makes my answer: "So, through me, freedom and the sea will make their answer to the shuttered heart." Or, in his Spanish... Y así, por mí, la libertad y el mar responderán al corazón oscuro. This is what I long to do (and you understood it, didn't you? All those years ago?) and to begin, I have to start gardening.

I kneel in the dirt today, dig my hands in between the roots of what we've planted, and watch in amazement as He and I plant beautiful things. 

Love, always, in the grey days of homesickness and the gentle rain on the roof, 

Hilary

I remember the word release (a post about freedom)

The song sounds on repeat through the quiet office. She sings about arriving, coming to Him, bending our hearts again to unload the storms and the distress and the weight at the foot of the cross. About His light, and His calm. But in the quiet place where Lent feels like every day, release is a word for being washed clean of whatever you are bearing, unclenching your hands from the paper that is due, the laundry that needs folding, the letter that needs writing, the report you didn't manage to finish at the office. Release is a word for an exhale and a small smile when you realize you need not hold all things all together all the time.

Word for Today: Release

Definition: Release means freeing from restraint, confinement or servitude. It means to relieve from something that confines, burdens or oppresses. Release is a word about setting free, unyoking. It is about relinquishing. Release is a word about freedom. 

Release, v. To lay down the expectations. They are heavy loads, the things we demand of ourselves. The narrow vision - I am this kind of friend, I am this kind of wife, I am this kind of teacher, I am this kind of Christian. We whisper the vision in each moment of possible failure, of the coming up short. It's at the water fountain when I'm gulping down replenishment in the thirty second window before I need to go to work, that I feel them clamber into my head - be this, do that, if you were a better this thing you wouldn't feel this way. Release is the word for standing up, feeling the water journey down into your stomach, full of its necessity, tracing its path down the back of your throat... standing up and saying, "I can do no more."

Release, v. To run forward. We can't run with burdens, our pockets full of gravelly guilt and shame and that word failure. We can't run, new sneakers on pavement, the pounding heartbeat and the Kreb's cycle at work in our mitochondria... not if we carry restraints. Not if we are yoked to what we imagine we ought to be. Not if our hearts are shackled to the first glorious imagining where we are perfect and life is perfect and nothing falls apart, because if it falls apart, we whisper, it just proves what we secretly worried all along - that we aren't, can't, won't be, that other word enough. Release is a word for things falling out of your hands and your feet taking you forward anyway.


Release, v. To shout in your car against the pounding rain that this is the truth: He came for you. He came for your small shivering self. He came into the world as a child to make you His child. As I drove home the other night I swung my car around my favorite bend in the road in the state park, and I started talking to God about the things that are confusing, and about how much I don't know, and how I'm so tired of not being chosen, of feeling like I can't do it right, or right enough. 


How can this be, Lord? That you came into the world for me? That you want me to be yours? That even though I jump out of the sheep pen and even though I prefer the wandering wilderness and the shadows and every broken heartaching drama to you, even then you come to look for me? Because it's not my goodness. It's your grace. 


Release, n. This is the being-set-free. The promise He shouts everywhere in this wide earth - a promise that in this moment, there is nothing more beautiful than your delight in sunlight dancing through trees. Release is standing still, grass tickling your bare feet, closing your eyes, and hearing Him say: 

"Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." - Isaiah 43.19


May the promise, and the freedom, and the release sound in your heart today. 


Love,
Hilary