It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.
The world don’t want you as long as there is any life in you at all.
Some dogs bite. So you keep them away from people. You can’t just get rid of them, for being the way they are. And now and then you can be glad to have them around, to snarl the way a good dog never does.
I could probably not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.
She was afraid to be angry and that made her angry.
Your mother asked him if he would like to say grace, and he did, with an elegant simplicity that seemed almost wasted on macaroni and cheese.
If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I’m sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy. And probably a little bit surprised.
Kindly intentioned, but not considerate.
That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.
Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.
History could make a stone weep.
Well, he says, basically, that people have to suffer to really recognize grace when it comes. I.
Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for us as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.
That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup.
Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.
Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.
The twinkling of an eye... that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. ‘The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.’ That’s a fact.
Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.
It seemed to her there was a peacefulness about him that came with resignation, with the extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible, the unrealized, the yet to be determined.
It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.