Prayer. Reminder.

Jesus, my grasp is weak. My mind is feeble, my eyes are dim, and my reach is always too short. But I thank you, over and over, I thank you that you chose to call us not servants, but friends, that you choose to reveal to us your will, involve us in your plan.

God, we can’t thank you enough to ever mean it truly for the cross of Christ. We cannot forget the cross, that expression of your ultimate and perfect and unfathomable love.

God, I am so grateful that you are God-centered, not Hillary-centered. I am just Hillary; of sinners, I am the worst. I am nothing without You. You, God, are perfect love. And you will bring your name to the highest glory, you will demand that we love you more than anything because you are the only constant, the only thing we could love that will never fail. Only by loving you above all else can we experience ultimate joy. You are a God-centered God because you are Love, Love-Centered God. Thank you.

I pray in absolute confidence that this world will never be the same for what has happened today, that you will have your name glorified above all until every knee bows and every tongue confesses, and God I am so grateful that my weak eyes will one day see it.

Titles, Resolving, and 2010

When I started this blog two years ago, I agonized for hours on what to name it. “Walls for the Wind” is the perfect name for it, for so many reasons. Not simply because it’s a lyric from an Irish blessing (though that adds to the appropriateness, certainly) but because that lyric describes me and what I’m doing here very well.

If you now me well enough, you’ll know that I’d much rather you didn’t people didn’t seem me vulnerable or emotional. In fact, if you read this, odds are in my favor that you’ve never seen me shed a tear. Not because I don’t feel, but because I don’t show it. Not normally. It’s a defense mechanism; I’m working on it, in any case. Besides, it’s for your own good, too! Once you get past that key layer in my defenses, it’s tough to get me to shut up. ;-)

“Walls for the wind” works for other reasons, too. In the physical sense, we want walls to keep the wind out—it’s a nice, alliterative term for shelter, safety. I do take refuge in words.

Here’s what I wrote in my first entry on this blog; even here I wasn’t overt about my purpose in writing.

“I used to write on LiveJournal. That little corner of cyberspace put up with my musings, complaints, and questions for several years, but it's time to start fresh. Some of those days, I hope to stay in the past. The other ones will live in my memory. So farewell, LiveJournal.”

I did delete that old LJ; most of it was just whining that embarrassed me. In my mind, “starting fresh” as I said, meant writing deliberately, about truths, about things that matter to more than just me. In fact, I started the  blog as a New Year’s resolution going into 2008. To write more and about truth—specifically, I resolved to use blogging as a way to deepen my understanding of the Bible and strengthen my relationship with Christ. That’s why many of my entries are spiritual in focus; it’s to keep myself focused. And hopefully, draw your own interest in.

In the final sense, “walls for the wind” is a title that reflects that purpose. The writers of the New Testament often compared the Holy Spirit to wind, or breath.

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” John 3:8

Even the strongest of believers is guilty of building walls to hold the Spirit out. We don’t want to concede our plans for the will of God; we think we can live our lives better on our own terms, do we not? My words on this corner of Cyberspace make up my expressions of these walls of my own paltry understanding.

More than anything, I write to break down walls, not to build them. Break down my own emotional walls so I can be closer to others, put out of my comfort zone, and to break down my “walls for the wind” so I can let the Spirit lead me.

Hopefully, now, some of my musings make more sense to you. They do to me. And now, finally, I wish you and yours a very Happy New Year.

-Hillary

Old Long Since

Apparently, that’s the literal Scottish translation of “Auld Lang Syne",” the song typically sung at New Year’s. The song with the melody everyone knows and the words no one knows. More “idiomatically” (according to Wikipedia), it means “long, long ago.” That seemed more appropriate for a near-end of the year blog post.

Yesterday, I aged another year without the world being profoundly different for it. For me, however, this year has been one of the most influential of my life.

Long, long ago, I stepped off a canoe onto the banks of a Peruvian village called “Shevojah” where I slept in a tent, ate more power bars than I ever care to eat for the rest of my life, and faced the first major and irrevocable change to my life plans in quite some time.

Long, long ago I made the decision to return to CLR for summer 2009. Anyone who has ever spent more than an hour in my company knows how integral that place has been in my life for the past year. Past three years, if we’re honest with ourselves.

This year I went to more weddings and heard about more engagements than ever before; however, I’m certain 2010 will surpass 2009 in that happy respect.

This past semester, Fall 2009, was my last semester in undergraduate classes; I worked harder in those four months than I think I ever have at more tasks than I’ve ever had to tackle. I think I miffed many people with my slightly hermit-esque behavior at school and with my tendency to flee to camp almost every other weekend. I don’t regret it, but I do hope to cling harder to my social life in 2010. Perhaps as a student teacher, that is a fool’s hope. We’ll see.

This year taught me many pretty lessons, the most stunning of which was learning that being a professional writer is not actually one of my dreams. Even the world of fiction writing becomes tedious if visited too often and out of obligation. My goal for my life, then, is balance. Never making the things I love too overtly into jobs.

Many people make resolutions at this point… mine, I think, are simple enough.

1. Love more.
2. Talk less.
3. Walk more.
4. Sit less.
5. Read more.
6. Watch less.
7. Pray more.
8. Worry less.
9. Trust more.
10. Hide less.

We’ll see how it goes, won’t we?

A Day for a Poem

It's never scientific, after all.
There is no checklist, no empirical process
no necessary weather forecast or
emotional state of being.

It's not a particularly sunny day, now
the rain has settled into stagnant pools among
the dead leaves, and the sun hides behind dull
clouds like the word you can sense but never find
when you need it.

My feet are cold, and my house nearly emptied.
My mother must have turned on the Christmas tree
before she left, and the dogs sleep beneath it like presents;
however, Christmas is still to come.

Today is no one's birthday, nor the anniversary of
a sweet gesture, so far as I can remember.
It's almost lunchtime, and no one has died,
or proposed, or graduated.

But most of our problems stem from being too
inwardly focused, I think, so just because I can't find
any socks, or see sunlight shatter in beams through clouds,
or make note of this day as when I found true love

doesn't mean that it hasn't been a tear-soaked,
laughter-filled and unforgettable day for someone else on
the other side of this earth. So I put my glasses on
and decided today was as good as any day for a poem.

Distractive Listening

Walking around my college campus, for what will be my last year, I've noticed a few things that might have slipped my notice in years passed. For example, I've always been aware of how students and others walking around the city walk with their headphones or earbuds on, listening to music as they walk from place to place. However, I've not stopped to think about this new tendency until today.

I passed a friend of mine today, who was listening to her music, smiling distantly, and even bobbing her head a bit to the music. I waved and called her name, but she couldn't hear me. I laughed it off as we always do, but I couldn't shake the sense that this picture of extreme individualism was more than just a society-wide affinity for good tunes.

Why is it that we are so apt to slide on the headphones and turn on the iPod as we walk crowded streets? Why do we want to cover up the sounds our surroundings with music? Just walking back to my apartment after passing my friend, I was so much more aware of the sounds of my city: people talking, tourists, the sound of cars and footsteps and hoof-beats from carriage tours. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed the wind whistling through the changing leaves and my hair.

Even when jogging or working out, the first thing we do is put in headphones, to watch the TV perched on the  edge of the treadmill or to listen to our favorite playlists as we run a capricious path between buildings and patches of grass. Why is that? Do we not want to hear our own labored breaths or the sounds of our own feet pounding against the ground? Would we rather focus on the beat of the music than the beat of our hearts? Why the distraction?

Perhaps, instead, it is a ploy to keep our privacy. When you walk or jog down the street with buds in your ears, you are less likely to hear someone call your name, or call for help. If you're waiting at the corner for the light to change, a stranger is not going to strike up a casual conversation with you once they see the headphones. The tiny white buds are a great wall.

I wonder if this isn't some grand metaphor playing out before our eyes; so many people among us are walking through life with buds in their ears, listening only to what they want to hear--not hearing heir own labored breaths and racing heart and pounding footsteps as they jog, a reminder of their fragile grasp on life, of impending mortality. Maybe none of us want to hear ourselves running because we'd have to then acknowledge from what we are fleeing. So many people around us, waiting on the light to change, have in the ear buds, not wanting you to start a conversation with them outside of their convenience, not hearing the Voice calling their name.

Or maybe we are the ones with the headphones on. Maybe we don't want to acknowledge our surroundings, hear the cries for help, or even hear the sounds of city and nature. "In the world, and not of it," we might say to ourselves as we jog, taking Words out of context as we are so apt to do and running, running from the faces and stories and waving arms, not waving but drowning. And it's all too easy to say we didn't hear, but the truth of it all is we fail to listen.