Frederick Buechner to Me

"God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say.  Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of our years, but often it takes many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is.  Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus as alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing.

A child takes life as it comes because he has no other way of taking it.  The world had come to and end that Saturday [Sunday] morning, but each time we had moved to another place, I had seen a world come to an end, and there had always been another world to replace it.  When somebody you love dies, Mark Twain said, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.  For me it was longer than for most, if indeed I have realized it fully even yet, and in the meantime the loss came to get buried so deep in me that after a time I scarcely took it out to look at it at all, let alone to speak of it.  If anybody ever asked me how my father died, I would say heart trouble.  That seemed at least a version of the truth.  He had a heart.  It had been troubled."  

Her heart was full though.  She knew trouble but lived in peace.