'"Truly, truly, I say to you, ...you will be sorrowful," Jesus said. Well, ...we're sorrowful about lots of things, you and I, God knows. It goes with the territory, sorrow. We carry it about with us the way a snail carries it shell; it is one of the homes we live in - sorrow about our country and about our pillaged earth, sorrow that youth grows old and beauty fades. Sorrow about death - about all the undone things the dead leave behind them as we will leave undone things behind us too when our time comes, like a pair of old shoes broken in to to take us on some blessed journey we never got around to taking, maybe the most crucial journey of our lives. But as Christians we inherit this special refinement of sorrow that Jesus speaks of, this sorrow for connoisseurs - which is the sorrow of not seeing plainly the One we need most to see.'
Frederick Buechner, 'A Little While' in A Room Called Remember, p.99.
