In A Split Second

The past few months have been hard on my faith. Seemed like one day I looked around at the world and couldn't comprehend anymore that a God could exist, or that there could possibly be an underlying order or meaning in the chaos of my life, let alone other people's. In a split second, just like that, my faith suddenly made no sense. I had a longing for God, but felt I'd lost him. I became truly afraid of death as I realized, for maybe the first time in my life, that I didn't know for certain what, if anything, might lie on the other side.

Then tonight I read this passage, in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping:

For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

Maybe those words mean nothing to you. That's ok. They mean something to me, though. I can't really explain but somehow, after reading them, and in spite of all the doubts and fears that still won't be fully assuaged, I'm comforted. Somehow, even if just for a split second, God makes sense again.

And in that split second, there's always hope. For what? I'm honestly not sure right now. But I'll hold onto it anyway, just the same.