Quotes from Frederick Buechner

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality-not as we expect it to be but as it is-is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another's burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad.

The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you need most to do and the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement, but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement.

The worst isn't the last thing about the world. It's the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It's the power from on high that comes down into the world, that wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it? The last, best thing is the laughing deep in the hearts of the saints, sometimes our hearts even. Yes. You are terribly loved and forgiven. Yes. You are healed. All is well.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

One life on this earth is all we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.

You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary.

Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.

Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life...

in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all.

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.