virginia woolf in the afternoon.

Whenever I feel a little lost and have had a day of wondering about my calling, my future, my ministry and questions abound, but answers are few, I find it hard to pray. I can't seem to get to that quiet place of rest where I can just swim in the presence of God. I also cannot sort my thoughts enough to put my restless mind into into words.

The way I sometimes pray is to open familiar books. I run my fingers across the soft worn pages and I look to find some place of comfort in the space of words. Words that have spoken to me before, I know may speak some new thing to me now.

This afternoon, I opened an old favorite, To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf-- and here is what I found. For some reason, this makes sense to me, and bring me a peace I rest in. I feel the sense that all the little moments of love are mounting into the wave that is my life -- my own particular life, which is exactly the one I was meant to have.

"They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting, she felt how life, from being made up of separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."

Though life sometimes feels like a confused series of unconnected moments, and random choices, I rest in the sense that in the end it does build to this whole thing. And even though, it happens so quickly, a mere blink of an eye, the crash of a wave. Still, there it is: our life lived, our calling unfurled, our moment of becoming what God created us to be.