Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.
Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.
It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in the world.
Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.
Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.
Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else--ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it's weak, but sometimes you'd rather just have a map.
Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.
Where do you think you're going?" Dr. Nokes demanded.... "What do you have for directions?" And Dad... said, "I have the substance of things hoped for. I have the anticipation of things unseen"
It is one thing to say you're at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with it's crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely.
We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day.
Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long.
Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE'S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, "I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?" "Prevail on Dale," I repeated to Swede. "To make a sale," she added. "And if we fail, we'll whale on Dale--" "Till he needs braille!" "Will you guys des..
Someday, you know, we're going to be shown the great ledger of our recorded decisions-a dread concept you nonetheless know in your deepest soul is true.
You never like it to happen, for something as hopeful and sudden as a January thaw to come to an end, but end it does, and then you want to have some quilts around.
We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly, and bitterly wept as we bore him along. For we all loved our comrade so brave, young and handsome, we all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong." The Cowboy's Lament"
You can't explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn't even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.
And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme..
Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it's getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.
When did it come to Davy Land that exile is a country of shifting borders, hard to quit yet hard to endure, no matter your wide shoulders, no matter your toughened heart?
You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless - for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all.
A person never knows what is next--I don't anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.
I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers. Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.
You can't kill history. You can't shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that--if it's going to die, it has to die on its own