Frederick Buechner

I'm reading Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons and they are moving me deeply. Here are a few quotes:

All of us, for instance, carry around inside ourselves, I believe, a certain emptiness- a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that, somehow all is not right inside our skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence so that we know him best through our missing him.

All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into that nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance- not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us different, are, "be brave...be merciful...feed my lambs...press in toward the goal"