wisdom below from The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner:
"What
each of them [the events of our lives] might be thought to mean separately is less important than what
they all mean together. At the very
least they mean this: LISTEN.
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening…
A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on that journey.
Listen back to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not and to those too that give no delight at all and hurt like hell…
The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other- not a song with words but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is part.
The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak- even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked 10,000 times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anymore.
He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and our own footsore and sacred journeys.
We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music.
Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all, but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement…
”Be not afraid, for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began.
LISTEN FOR HIM.
Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him…"
prayer from Trinity Church in Boston on the day before the marathon
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