To Be Where You Are (Mitford Years, #14)

by Jan Karon

It would be nice to have clean bedclothes to look forward to when he finished his book tonight, and Lord knows, he hated to finish it. He’d got so used to that book, it was like he was livin’ in a whole other place.

Anybody could wear low-heeled black shoes, which, if the eye trailed down that far, disappointed the onlooker. Red shoes gave people a lift. Maybe that’s why she was spared—to give people a lift once in a while.

‘Let’s pray about it. You told me not long ago that it’s hard to remember to pray. How’s that going?’ ‘Spotty. I usually remember to thank him, but mostly I forget to ask.’ ‘Takes practice. A long obedience in the same direction, as Nietzsche said.’

He needed to stop messing up his mind with the future and concentrate on what was at hand.

‘We don’t have to give the world the emotional spectrum of King Lear or the exalted praise of the Messiah or the figure of David released from marble. We don’t have to do great things to make a difference. We can make a great difference by doing small things graciously.

It was magic that a book could make a person laugh an’ cry an’ feel things they never felt before.

I prayed for someone like her, but never believed it could happen. We do that, don’t we? Pray for something, but don’t trust God for it.’

Maybe the best way to honor the deceased was to laugh with the living.

An absolute terror was upon her. Yet in all this, she was to trust God—and more than that, yes, truly more than that, she was to thank him.

Though he was beyond serving the mission field, wasn’t his own town a mission field? No famine, no poverty, no war, thanks be to God, but a mission field, nonetheless. And didn’t charity begin at home?

‘You’re happy with what’s going on.’ ‘I love it. I’m not scared to death anymore. It is what it is; I’m giving it my best. That’s all I can do.’