Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good

Loving rereading my favorite modern author Jan Karon's  Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good* in anticipation of her newest book coming out next week.  Here's a sampling:

"I ask you to give Timothy your words, and to anoint all that he says and does to draw Sammy into the circle of your astonishing grace.  May it be a tender time, somehow transforming in ways we can't know."  [p. 226]

"At the altar of defeat, he laid the stick of grace.  Then he turned and went home to the yellow house where he had been given everything and more, none of it especially deserved."  [p. 228]

"He wept face forward, then, into the gale of those aghast at what was happening, wept for the wounds of any clergy gone out into a darkness of self-loathing and beguilement; for the loss and sorrow of those who could not believe, or who had once believed but lost all sense of shield and buckler and any notion of God's radical tenderness, for the ceaseless besettings of the flesh, for the worthless idols of his own and of others; for those sidetracked, stumped, frozen, flung away, for those both false and true, the just and the unjust, the quick and the dead....
He wept for himself, for the pain of long years and the exquisite satisfactions of the faith, for the holiness of the mundane, for the thrashing exhaustions and the endless dyings and resurrectings that malign the soul incarnate...."

"...And the people wept with him, most of them.  Some turned away, and a few got up and left in a hurry, fearful of the swift and astounding movement of the Holy Spirit among them..."  [p. 252]

*from her Mitford series, beginning with At Home in Mitford