One Thousand Gifts

I started an amazing book last night.  I "happened" to see my friend Theresa giving it the highest recommendation on a Facebook post and I take her recommendations seriously.  When I saw what the book was about, it sounded like exactly what I need right now: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.  I've only read the first chapter, but I have already been deeply affected.  I think I'll write out passages that strike me as I go through the book. 

The section begins with a conversation between the author and her brother-in-law:
"I grab him by the shoulders and I look straight into those eyes, brimming.  And in this scratchy half whisper, these ragged words choke - wail.  'If it were up to me...' and then the words pound, desperate and hard, 'I'd write this story differently.' [...]  He's watching that sea of green rolling in the winds.  Then it comes slow, in a low, quiet voice that I have to strain to hear.  'Just that maybe...maybe you don't want to change the story, because you don't know what a different ending holds.' [...]
There's a reason I am not writing the story and God is.  He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means.
I don't. [...]
I think of buried babies and broken, weeping fathers over graves, and a world pocked with pain, and all the mysteries I have refused, refused to let nourish me. [...] With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too...if the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.
To see through to God.
That that which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond.  To Him.  To the God whom we endlessly crave."