Pay Attention
You never know what may cause tears. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.
- Frederick Buechner
Meaning in Life
Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn’t mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice. Only never take your choice too easily, of course. Never assume that because you have taken it one way today, you may not take it another way tomorrow.
- Frederick Buechner
Welcoming Holland
But in the war for a place in the sun, we must never mistake conquest for final victory, and above all, we must never mistake failure for final defeat. Because even if we do not find our place in the sun, or not quite the place we want, or a place where the sun is not as bright as we always dreamed it would be, this is not the end because this is not really the decisive war even though we spend so much of our lives assuming that it is. The decisive war is the other one – to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave. And this is a war against the darkness which no man fights alone. It is the war which every man can win who wills to win because it is the war which God also wills us to win and will arm us to win if only we will accept his armor.
- Frederick Buechner
