Nathaniel Hardman

I don't know how one boy could have caused so much disappointment without ever giving anyone any grounds for hope.

All the children play at war now. All of them make those sounds of airplanes and bombs and crashing and exploding. We did the same things, playing at cannon fire and bayonet charges.
There is certainly nothing in that fact to reassure.

This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, you first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

He was a Baptist, a firm believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was not.

I am also inclined to overuse the word "old," which actually has less to do with age, as it seems to me, than it does with familiarity. It sets a thing apart as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection. Sometimes it suggests haplessness or vulnerability. I say, "old Boughton," I say "this shabby old town," and I mean that they are very near my heart.

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the "I" whose predicate can be "love" or "fear" or "want" and whose object can be "someone" or "nothing" and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around "I" like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.

I do truly wish I had the means to spare you the slightest acquaintance with that very poverty the Lord Himself blessed by word and example. Once when I worried about this out loud, your mother said, "You think I don't know how to be poor? I done it all my life." And still it shames me to think that I will leave you and your mother so naked to the world--dear Lord, I think, spare them that blessing.

Ashy biscuit, summer rain, her hair falling wet around her face. If I were to multiply the splendors of the world by two - the splendors as I feel them - I would arrive at an idea of heaven unlike anything you see in the old paintings.