When I don’t have any words, or when I can’t seem to arrange them in a way that says anything new; when I am tired, tired of trying to be funny or find meaning or just plain tired in the regular variety; when I am avoiding writing of any kind - ignoring the public kind and frantically pushing aside the private - because it seems there is just nothing there…or that even if there was, someone else could say it better…

Then, this is why I must.

“Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye.  Eating lunch with a friend.  Trying to do a decent day’s work.  Hearing the rain patter against the window.  There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of all that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly…. If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this:  Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness:  touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Frederich Buechner, Now and Then
as quoted by Nancy Beach in Gifted To Lead

…life itself is grace…

this time last year: you could call it roadblog. or idrive. (10. 11. 2007)