God Speaks to us Through What Happens
Day 29
Buechner identifies the moment when he began to turn to his own life as a “source of treasure”.
“Anyway, after having nearly driven myself to a nervous breakdown trying to write [another] novel, what I suddenly decided to do was to try to write about this, my life as an alphabet, all of our lives as an alphabet, as a series of events through which God is trying to say something.
“I called the lectures, and then the book which they became, The Alphabet of Grace. God as grace speaks to us through what happens. I went to Harvard and delivered them. What I did was take a representative day of my life - getting up, waking up the children, going to the john, having breakfast, going off to work, kissing my wife good-bye, coming back, and this, that, and the other, going to bed, going to sleep-just a representative day and listening to whatever it was that was holy in it. I admire my courage in retrospect because there I was standing in this exalted place, preceded by all these distinguished theologians, and talking about waking my children up, going to the john, having breakfast, and so on, but I did it. And it was a key moment for me because it turned me, literarily speaking and for the first time, to my own life as a source of treasure. It's out of that experience that the autobiographical books came, where I looked back on a certain section of my life and asked the same question, "What was there in it of God?’”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp94-95.
To help you reflect…
Practise turning to your life as a source of treasure. Look back at today or yesterday or the past week and ask yourself: “what was there in it of God?”
