New friends

An ache of homesickness came over me, for our old life before Sam's
blood got funky, for the sweet functional surface of that life, for the stuff
and routine that hold me together, or at least that I believe hold me together.
That's the place I like to think of as reality. Maybe it's full of lusts and
hormones and yearnings for more, more, more, and maybe it is all about clutching
and holding and tightness, but I just love it to pieces and it was where I
wanted to be.

From Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies

They are the songs of a people who were moving away from a known situation
into the unknown, and they were often angry with a God who removed all those
certainties, who instead seemed to be leading them along an apparently
precarious path. They did not sit down for long beside gently flowing
streams or
linger in lush meadows. When we pray the psalms as they did, we,
too, are
compelled to stay "at the raw edge," in the words of Walter
Brueggemann.
There comes a time when the things that were undoubtedly good
and right in
the past must be left behind, for these is always the danger
that they might
hinder us from moving forward and connecting with the
one necessary thing,
Christ himself.
Insecurity makes certitude
attractive, and it is in times like these that I
want to harness God to my
preferred scheme of things, for it is risky to be so
vulnerable.

From Esther de Waal's book To Pause at the Threshold.

Esther and Anne are my new best friends. Esther lives on the border land between England and Wales - I'm moving there next week. (not really). Anne is naughty and funny and honest in all the best ways. Funny how God provides people and encouragement at just the right time, and these people don't always show up in the flesh. Some day I will meet these women - that will be sweet!