"What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter's sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?"
~Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
So maybe it's the timing of it all -- I read this book during our Rocio Del Mar liveaboard vacation earlier this month (which, by the way, was fantastic yet again and we plan to do it again next year, but more on that another time) -- which occurred smack dab in the middle of packing off to move 8,000+ miles from my birth family and my in-love family, and leave the career I've had 19.9 years, and leave the country and state and city I love ...
... but I enjoyed ... or, more accurately stated, I was edified by ... Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things more than any other book I've read in, well, years. I haven't stopped, re-read, re-read out loud, then highlighted so many portions of a book since reading Father Gregory Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion a few years ago.
And there are just so many things she said that keep bouncing around my head ... sometimes as a whisper, other times so loud it drowns out everything else for a moment. It'd probably be violating some copyright law to post all the "moments" that moved me in one post, so ... for today, I'll just the one that speaks to me on Sundays ...