Thursday, October 23, 2008

Listen to your life!!!

ok. you have to sssllloowww down to read this.
stop.
take a deep breath.
and read EACH AND EVERY WORD.
it's so good.
but you can't read it fast to really get it.

"By examining as closely and candidly as I could the life that had come to seem to me in many ways a kind of trap or dead-end street, I discovered that it really wasn't that at all. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. 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, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that 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.
Frederick Buechner, "Now and Then"

oh. i love that!
don't you??

4 comments:

Tisha said...

Yes, love that.

Julie said...

yes I do...thanks for sharing and reminding!

Alden and Dorian said...

WOW ~ that is AMAZING and full of truth. That IS the preciousness of life on this earth....that we usually are SO busy to not notice. I will say....as you get older...(50's anyway) you do begin to SEE that more and more....the gift that life is...and all to see God in the midst of it all. Thanks for sharing that Courtney.

And.............by the way.....all your pictures the last few days have been ADORABLE! I love them all. Kisses to each and every one of you........blessings in my life from God.

Katy said...

Listen to your life. that's really good.