when i meet my ghosts

The ghosts cling to me, thin and cobwebbed. They trail behind me. I don't notice them for 1,000 days and then I play a song, five minutes of praise and the ghosts crowd the car, clamoring for my attention. They all want to hold my hand. They all want to remind me, to whisper their moment back into life.There are 43 days of ghosts and then there are 180 days of ghosts that surround them and there are moments that stretch too far forwards and backwards to count.They are ghosts dressed in scrubs and halogen lights. They are ghosts that use hand sanitizer and take off all jewelry below the elbow. They are ghosts of footsteps and clipboards and bedsides.I tell myself we have moved farther out on the water. I tell myself that me and God, we are so much farther out, we are finally okay together again, we can talk.But when I sing that the grave cannot hold what your grace has justified, when I try to sing that this is the day that the Lord has made, and I will rejoice and be glad in it then I am a living ghost, driving the old roads by the Waco airport, praying, believing for a miracle that became 43 days and two surgeries and 7,000 cotton tipped applicators and 104 trach changes and two nights where only the ghost of my heart kept beating and only the ghost of my lungs kept breathing as we suctioned and prayed and ran out of oxygen and drove to the hospital.What should I do with these ghosts? One moment I declare that they should be banished, for there is no use for them here where we are all living. And then I feel my daughter moving inside me and I see my son moving outside me and I realize that I do not want to give them up to the God whose name I sometimes cannot really speak. I do not want to know how frail my own arms are. I do not want to keep going in pursuit of him. I imagine that Peter's sinking was not just because he doubted, no, it was also weariness, because the days are long and the nights can be longer, living with the mystery of the Son of God. I imagine that the work of faith to keep your feet afloat was too much for him - how often it is too much for me. How far away Jesus must have seemed on that dark water. How far away Jesus seems to me when the ghosts remember for me how very deep and dark is the sea.This is not a story of banishing those ghosts, this is not a story of dismissing them with the fierce words of promise or the declarations of Zephaniah spread over me like a shield. This is not a story of taking respite from the storm in the Word because here the Word is in the storm, and the Word is troubled waters, in the very midst of them, not just a peaceful bridge over.But the Word of God is not a ghost.No, the Word of God is living and active, and sharper than a sword... and it pierces past my memories and the clouds of tears in the Target parking lot. There is no easy resolution. But there is encounter. Among the waves, in the water itself, there Jesus comes to meet me.It's been almost two years since I walked the hallways of the NICU. And there are songs that call up those footsteps and Subway still tastes like waiting for a surgeon's call - but now I see Jesus walking next to me. We haven't talked much about those days.But we somehow have been in them together.Love,hilary

when the writing happened

Five years ago, I was graduating from college, fraught with excitement. I see myself in the embroidered dress that didn't fit quite right but I wore defiantly, insistently, because it was the symbol of the woman I wanted to be - carefree, long-haired, successful, spontaneous... Isn't it funny how we imagine future selves by the clothes they will wear? How we dress up to become someone we think would be better than the person we already are?I remember driving through the silent back roads of New England towns, the dress put away, the ghost of the scrap of paper where I'd given the college boy my address hovering near my right hand. I listened to "Holocene" on repeat and furiously tried to make my mind form complicated thoughts, serve up explanations sophisticated enough for the woman I thought I could step into being.--Five years ago I longed to be a writer. I read poetry in quiet corners of campus and once I read John Steinbeck with a cold mug of coffee in front of me - the cream swirling reluctantly towards the top as the hours ticked by. I told myself I wanted to be one of those people, Marilynne Robinson and John Steinbeck and Christian Wiman, Ted Kooser and Erica Funkhouser and Edward Hirsch, people who made poems out of life and who mades living itself kindling for a flame of words.I used to exchange poetry by email with a couple of coworkers on Fridays. It didn't last, sadly, like so many of my well-intentioned plans for writing. I was so good at telling myself I was and would be and must be a writer that I didn't need to do much writing.I dressed the way I thought writers must dress. I listened to Bon Iver driving those backroads and imagined how someday I would build a world in words and a reader would drive with me and feel the slick new pavement, the sudden silence of the car wheels beneath our feet. I believed this is what would make me meaningful.--I wrote a book. I wrote it looking nothing like a writer and feeling nothing like the woman I promised I would become in order to be that writer. I wrote the book because writing it was the single thread back to Jesus I could find when the maze of the NICU closed in and I could not sleep for worrying and I could not pray for not sleeping and I could not believe what I had always believed I would believe.That is where the writing came. It stole up on me, a strange friend in the nights and I was not ready.. I had no clean Moleskin journals, no special sharpie pens for observing the world. I had not perfected the look of a writer, the feel of the words tumbling forth free. I thought writing would be like breaking a necklace of pearls - one snap, one idea, and the beauty would just spill out and clatter on the table and people would rush to snatch up as many as they could.But for me writing this book was becoming an oyster, shell rough, cemented to a rock and clinging hard at the regular chaos of the tides. Writing this book was building up a single pearl from a single grain of sand that found its way in uninvited and unexpected. My book is not the pearl, really - I think the pearl must be my whole life, my being with God, and maybe the book is the single grain of sand or maybe it is just a glimpse inside this oyster shell - a peek into the becoming of another believer.I hope, in any case, that the book is a story of this becoming.--There is so much to tell in the next few weeks - there is news of publishing the book, titles and covers and preordering and how very much I want to share with you this glimpse into the opening of Jack's story and the opening of mine, too. I want to thank you for reading this blog, this haphazard collection of snapshots. I want to thank you for following along with Jack's story in particular, for how you've listened and loved and prayed us through.This book I wrote in an unprepared season, when my table was not laid and my lamps not lit. A grain of sand and a lot of silence. A lot of my hair pulled back in a messy bun for days on end.But somehow the writing arrived, and now, soon, the book will too. I can't wait to share this with you.Love,hilary

the size of faith

"The size of your faith is not measured by the things you ask for."I said this as I watched the spearmint wilt under the heat of the water. Preston and I have taken to steeping the leaves themselves in our teapot some nights; it makes us slow down, at least for the ten minutes we set our timers to. We let water do its mysterious work. We wait.I found myself saying this to someone who was waiting with us for a second steeping of the leaves. We had been talking about big dreams that we all have, and the often insignificant size of the steps we take towards them every day. I am always quick with a sentence of empathy, support - but this one seemed to come from my mouth without me being the speaker. The size of your faith is not measured by what you ask for. We poured the tea, and we all went back to scribbling in notebooks the small next steps we might take towards realizing a big, beautiful dream. And I kept thinking about how it could be that I said something without having thought of it, read from my mind like so much ticker tape. The steam of the tea slowly settled as the cup grew colder in my hands. Long after we went to bed, I was still awake. Who was that speaking? Was that for me?Some days I am a wistful believer, a sideways-glancer, a noticer of those who stretch arms wide in worship and those who get readily, consistently, obediently to their knees every day. I keep a kind of faith envy nestled somewhere near where my collarbone meets my neck. That's where I feel it, a small lump when I see someone whose faith fairly sings, who is a small speck on the horizon of the water, running to Jesus. I screw up my eyes to try and glimpse what they're doing - I imagine them, pants or shorts or dresses soaked, feet pulling deep water up to the surface with each step, eyes fixed on the man who looks like everyone and no one, his arms stretched wider than seems possible in these limited muscles and bones. I imagine that meeting triumphant, full of love. I imagine this in my wistfulness, and I turn back grumbling. I've been in and out of the same boat ten thousand times. I have made it maybe ten steps on the water. I keep thinking I will see Jesus and my eyes hurt from peering in sun and fog and rain and ocean spray and so I turn back again and again to the boat.The size of your faith is not measured by what you ask for. Could that have been Jesus, sitting with us, watching water hiss and steam rise, waiting for that second cup of tea?And if it was Jesus, how can he be the same Jesus who I squint to see greeting the wilder faith of others so far out on the water?Jesus is the measurer, the keeper and maker and beholder of our faith. Jesus is as unafraid to get right up next to the boat as he is to stand back and call out.The size of your faith is not measured by how far out you ask to go.Sometimes, asking just to get one foot in the water is harder than asking to run ten miles on a surface that shouldn't hold us up. Sometimes, asking just to gain the strength to go to the next service, to walk up to Communion, to be held by someone else's prayer or someone else's faith, is a bigger ask than asking to see before our eyes a miracle of feet help up on the open sea.When I realized it was Jesus, I prepared myself for the reprimand. Envy is vice, clinging to my collarbone, keeping me grumbling in the bottom of the boat. I prepared myself with guilt and ashes and shame.Jesus does not come with those. Jesus comes with the same impossibly wide arms and the same embrace. Jesus gets into the boat with me on the days I cannot get out of it, and in his quietness he touches the lump in my throat, the envy at my neck, the same quizzical look in his eyes. The size of your faith is not measured by how far out you asked to go. It is not measured by how far out anyone else goes. I can feel the envy slipping away, dissolving like steam in the air.It is enough to ask for help getting out of the boat; it is enough to ask for help in asking.Love,hilary

so i write today

I am sitting on my bed in the chaos of Preston's departure, unwilling, unable, maybe, to really bring myself to the zumba youtube video workout or the making of dinner or the folding of laundry that's overdue in a corner of the room. It's a hard thing, long distance, because the stillness is lost in the miles logged, the yet-another-plane-ticket, the counting up and down the days and hours until you can be next to each other again. 

I am thinking about Momastery tonight. I'm not sure why, an article on Relevant that people have been sharing on facebook that made me think of something of hers I read once and so I go to Glennon's blog, because Sarah Bessey links to it and I see that under the Relevant article, and I find myself paging through and reading those good words and thinking about writing and good words and spaces with nice colors and clean CSS coding. And I think about how I have so often wanted to have a big space like that, and those thoughts have a something, I don't know if it's a bitterness or just a wistfulness, or somewhere between them, about writing and me and the wide gap between what I think it should be and what I think it is.

Her Ted Talk link is in a corner. I click, lean against the pillows. She is only a few minutes in when I start to cry. 

I want to be someone telling the world to take off its superhero cape. I want to tell you my story of emerging, how I have learned the shape of kindness can be the word no and the shape of grace can be in an ending. I want to tell you, especially, that I never thought I'd ever be a writer because I assigned the role to someone else in my poetry class that first year and I pretended I didn't want it so that it couldn't hurt me if it didn't happen, and I want to tell the world that sometimes the song about freedom has stanzas in it for whatever cage you've lived in. I want to be someone like Glennon, I think, and 17 minutes later I'm still on my bed in the same leggings avoiding the same zumba video with the same hole in my heart. 

There is a part of me that thinks in this moment about the fact that I don't have my own domain name and I don't know how to code CSS, that asks me who I think I am, writing like this, 23 years old and still not sure if she knows how to make pancakes right. 

But I am still writing today. I am still wanting to add some stanzas to that song about freedom and I still want to say to you that if you and me together in this watch these women - who write brave books and who speak brave Ted talks and who keep shouting about things like daring greatly and carrying on, warrior and being a jesus feminist and how mothers are superheroes - if you and me together watch them, 

I think we'll start to tell each other. We'll whisper carry on, warrior in the supermarkets and down the corridors and into all the small places of our lives. We will tell you the new mom as we hug you during the peace in church that you are a superhero. We will learn how to write cards and notes to girls who wonder about how to be brave and dare greatly. And we will tell them yes, you can. And we will tell them yes, you are brave and beautiful and good and let's be in this together. 

And so I write today. 

Love,
hilary