MY OWN HEART LET me more have pity on," Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote . . . and then he goes on: "Leave comfort root-room; let joy size / At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile / 's not wrung, see you: unforeseen times rather." Nor is it only the joy of God and the comfort of God that come at unforeseen times. God's coming is always unforeseen, I think, and the reason, if I had to guess, is that if he gave us anything much in the way of advance warning, more often than not we would have made ourselves scarce long before he got there.
-Originally published in The Sacred Journey
