Frederich Buechner always challenges my faith, inspires my heart and gives new insight into both how to understand and how to say things that are important.

Here’s an example – “The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light. It is a story that hides more than it reveals. It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it yet by no means a pretty story though that is the way we’re apt to peddle it much of the time."

I wish I could write like Buechner. There's the way he says it, the turn of phrase, the different slant that I'd not seen - perhaps would never have seen. His full life that has seen writing as ministry and more draws me sometimes to think I should at least try to put words to my own heart and mind, and to some at least of my experience. Buechner is right - that we pull our punch and play down the message we have ourselves to tell, and the Message of Jesus, the Story of the Gospel of God's grace. And yet, somehow the light keeps breaking through, the message gets out. Not always, not everywhere - but enough, lingering and lasting and touching people like me, and millions before in history and still, around the world.

Penultimate words to Buechner: - “We sand down the rough edges, play down the obscurities and contradictions. What we can’t explain, we explain away. We set Jesus forth as clear-eyed and noble-browed whereas the chances are he can’t have been anything but old before his time once the world started working him over and, once the world was through, his clear eyes were swollen shut and his noble brow as much of a shambles as the rest of him.”

Marvellous!