Jay hugged me hard when I left. He was going back to Colorado in a few days. “I don’t believe in God,” he said. “But sometimes when I’m up in the mountains above the tree line, it’s like whoa, you know: There’s a big, big love.”

“I know,” I said. Christianity wasn’t an argument I could win, or even resolve. It wasn’t a thesis. It was a mystery that I was finally willing to swallow. I was loved by a big love, in the midst of suffering, of hunger, even of death. Alleluia. What was, finally, so hard about accepting that?

from Take This Bread