words

I called this blog "full of life" because much of what I write about is trying to distinguish the qualitative difference between merely existing and living a life that is intentional, passionate, brave- a life that I would describe as full. I have been reading a book called The Sacred Journey in which another person Fredrick Buechner tells the story of his own quest for a full life (at least that is how I understand the plot). Some of his words have really touched me:
To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake-even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death-that little by little we start to come alive. -page 107

Listen. Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening.
A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on this journey. Listen back to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not, and to those too that give no delight and hurt like hell. Be not affeard. The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other-- not a song with words but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is a part

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak- even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journey. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But, be not affeard. He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.
- page 77-78