One of the greatest writers of our days, Frederick Buechner, says:

The invisible manifests itself in the visible. I think of the alphabet, of letters literally - A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all twenty-six of them. I think of how poetry, history, the wisdom of the sages and the holiness of the saints, all of this invisible comes down to us dressed out in the visible, alphabetic drab. 

I am speaking of the humdrum events of our lives as an alphabet.

I am thinking of grace. I am thinking of the power beyond all power, the power that holds all things in manifestation, and I am thinking of this power as ultimately Christ-making power, which is to say a power that makes Christs, which is to say a power that works through the drab and hubbub of our lives to make Christs of us before we're done or else, for our sake, graciously destroy us. In neither case, needless to say, is the process to be thought of as painless. 

This is exactly how I feel these days. Little things, the humdrum events of my life that seem too small to be even mentioned in my blog, all these are quietly working for mysterious ends and purposes which I'm not aware of. Or if, then only vaguely. The letters of the alphabet of grace. And the forming of those words, of course, is not a painless process.

I walked the streets of my beloved Tartu again a week ago. I went and sat in the uni's library, had a lunch with one of my best friends, and even had courage to show myself in the department of Estonian and general linguistics. Some old lecturers were there, happy to see me again. They still remembered me, five years after I left.

Last week I had a chance to meet up with the guy I did my legendary (or not so legendary) travels with exactly five years ago. We sat in my favourite restaurant in the Old Town and recalled the memories of our backpacking, hitch-hiking and couch-surfing through Europe with very little money and no plan B. He said he missed them days. I said I didn't. But it was very nice to meet him again nevertheless.

I took a long walk on the seaside yesterday evening with a friend and I realised that now really is the time of endless Nordic evenings when the sun doesn't want to set and the nights hardly get dark. There is something very special about this after a long and dark winter. And it made me think of the famous words of Albert Camus - in the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

I spent half of the Sunday staring at my laptop screen. I'll get there one day.

The humdrum events of life.