Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I'm feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.

It means the God who worries about our sins is not only God the judge, but also God the caretaker. He worries about sin because He craves righteousness, but also, simply, because He loves us.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Here is the thing about God. He is so big and so perfect that we can't really understand Him. We can't possess Him, or apprehend Him. Moses learned this when he climbed up Mount Sinai and saw that the radiance of God's face would burn him up should he gaze upon it directly. But God so wants to be in relationship with us that He makes himself small, smaller than He really is, smaller and more humble than his infinite, perfect self, so that we might be able to get to Him, a little bit.