A few short thoughts from the way of two souls. Nothing to learn by heart — only company for the road.
People speak of waiting as if it were an empty room you sit in until something happens. It is not. Waiting well is its own work, and it changes you. You learn what you actually want, as opposed to what you merely reach for when you are lonely. You let the cheap things pass. You become, slowly, the sort of person who could be trusted with a whole life.
So when we say we wait, we do not mean we endure. We mean we are getting ready. The one your soul is bound to is, somewhere, doing the same — and the waiting is the first thing the two of you ever do together, long before you meet.
Stand at the water’s edge on the islands and you stop hurrying, because the sea will not be hurried. It comes in on its own time and goes out on its own time, and it has been doing so since long before anyone built a church to argue about it.
We take a small instruction from that. Love arrives the way the tide does — not when you summon it, but when its hour comes. Your only task is to keep the shore ready: to be honest, to be gentle, to be unhurried. The water will find the land. It always has.
You can tell more about what a person believes from a single ordinary week in their home than from anything they would say about themselves. Are the promises kept? Is the kindness real when no one is watching? Is the door open to a friend in trouble?
Anam puts the whole of its faith there, in the ordinary. We do not think God lives only in grand buildings on appointed days. We think He is just as near in a meal made carefully, a temper held, a word kept. A good home is not the reward for faith. It is the faith.
“I kept my own faith. He never once asked me to set it down. What he asked — without ever really asking — was that I be patient and honest, and I found I was already trying to be those things for myself.”
— a walker of the path“No collection plate, no membership, no one keeping score of my attendance. Just a quiet idea that the person I am waiting for is worth becoming someone good for. It has cost me nothing but my worst habits.”
— kept, and keeping faith, JerseyIf any of this felt less like new information and more like remembering, that is the whole of it.