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He stopped tossing the ball. “You’re my best friend, Frank.”
This makes ya feel! The beauty of boyhood friendship, a true best friend. The kind of relationship we all long for but in so many ways gets lost as we age and life grows busier and more complicated. The simplicty of "because you're my best friend" is something we generally age out of as we grow more comfortable in our own skin, we start choosing activities over relationships, and start to see less of those we love most as a result
“He spent time in a North Korean POW camp. Did you know that, Ruth? He still has nightmares. He drinks because he thinks it helps him deal with the nightmares.” “You have nightmares. You don’t drink.” “Every man handles in a different way the damage war did to him.”
Everybody wants to tell other people how they should heal the scars on their own body, and they always assume those scars can heal, never considering that some things just don't get better
And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for her wisdom, a virtue not so fickle.”
WOOOOOOF!! Bars, as Gage would say
“We believe too often that on the roads we walk we walk alone. Which is never true. Even this man who is unknown to us was known to God and God was his constant companion. God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, that we wouldn’t feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though
we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And he promised us something else, the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven. This man, who in life may have felt utterly alone, feels alone no more. This man, whose life may have been days and nights of endless waiting, is waiting no more. He is where God always knew he would be,
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Man... This will make ya feel, and think, and hurt a little. But most of all it brings me comfort
“It’s a good day to be dead.”
We don't think like this in our post-christian, self-centric culture of the 2020s... But maybe we should. Because arent they all?
“I’ve got all day and I intend to take my time.”
Again, this is so unlike our world today, to spend time around death & giving it space to envelop our mind. But this is the second time now Gus has done just that, I like Gus
The truth is that when you kill a man it doesn’t matter if he’s your enemy and if he’s trying to kill you. That moment of his death will eat at you for the rest of your life. It’ll dig into bone so deep inside you that not even the hand of God is going to be able to pull it out, I don’t care how much you pray.
This part of war is often overlooked in broader culture. We think people are scarred because of what almost happened to them, but what they did to others can cut even deeper. How do you forgive yourself for taking a life?
In all that terrible waiting I didn’t feel the presence of God, not one bit. I prayed but unlike my father who seemed to believe that he was being heard, I felt as if I was talking to the air.
This stings but is a place we've all been, we just hope we aren't in this place at the times we need God most, like he is here
“It isn’t Easter,” he said, “but this week has caused me to think a lot about the Easter story. Not the glorious resurrection that we celebrate on Easter Sunday but the darkness that came before. I know of no darker moment in the Bible than the moment Jesus in his agony on the cross cries out, ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ Darker even than his death not long after because in death Jesus at last gave himself over fully to the divine will of God. But in that moment of his bitter railing he must have felt betrayed and completely abandoned by his father, a father he’d always believed loved
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“In your dark night, I urge you to hold to your faith, to embrace hope, and to bear your love before you like a burning candle, for I promise that it will light your way. “And whether you believe in miracles or not, I can guarantee that you will experience one. It may not be the miracle you’ve prayed for. God probably won’t undo what’s been done. The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.
Wowwwww alright this is good
“I won’t mind dying. I just don’t want you to die.”
THIS is love. To not fear death, but to fear life without them
“I’ll give Ariel a grand grave, I swear,”
This almost made me cry
and I couldn’t shake the concern that in the middle of the service she would spring from her pew and find some way to spite him.
This kind of concern over your mom's behavior will weigh on a kid. I feel for and relate to Frank here
He’d once again seen something that the rest of us had missed, an awful truth that he’d held to alone. Even in my anger I understood what a terrible burden that must have been.
To learn is to suffer, it all comes back around in this moment. Everybody carries something that shapes them
