What my Memoir is, Finally, About.

I ask questions. If I’m awake, I ask questions. Sometimes I think I confuse asking questions with breathing. Few of my questions are rhetorical. I want answers. To be clear, when I ask questions, it isn’t THE answer I’m looking for--not right off. Multiple, various answers are what I want from friends and acquaintances, or other people who are likely to know more about the subject at hand than I. I am happy for every answer. Give me three or five–a dozen. More! I will put them inside this safe place in my head. There, I will hold each one up against the question, looking for a likely match--the match that will fit tightly in the square hole of my question. Though most answers don't fit, I do not hurry, unwilling to risk eliminating a fine match just because it doesn't slide into place at once. Because that is almost never how it happens. Even an answer with huge potential will need to be shaved and smoothed down and polished before it's a perfect fit. That work is the part of the process for which I am--enthusiastically--responsible. For, to tell you the whole truth, after a lifetime of asking questions and collecting answers, I've become something of a craftsman at doing the fine-tuning, the work which turns the best of them into answers I can live with contentedly. And I do. Still, very occasionally, a question of mine will have no possible source for an answer other than my own mind. Or soul. Take a question that came to me about the title of this book. For as long as I have thought about writing a book about my spiritual journey, long before it led me to where I am now, long even before my story had a form–it had a name. At the top of the first page of a journal that became my first draft, I typed "Run with Patience." It was a phrase from Hebrews that seemed to me a perfect description of an imperative, on the journey on which I unexpectedly found myself: not to rush ahead at the headlong pace I did most things. I might think of the journey as a race–in the Bible it’s called that–but it was not against time. If my race, my journey, was against ANYTHING, it was against EVERYTHING that made or would make me want to stop. Perhaps at what seemed like a dead end. Or when the road directly ahead looked risky to take, even dangerous. Or, more than once, when I was --simply--exhausted to my marrow. It took me a very long time to realize that a genuine spiritual journey is not only not a sprint, not even a marathon, but that there is no finish line. The journey never ends. (I don’t even know–of course I don't!–that it ends with death. Why would it?) Another insight followed quickly for a change: I didn’t get to set the pace, God sets the pace. And not once. Slows me down, hurries me along, makes me stop to breathe deeply a few–or a few thousand–times. Along the way, I have been presented with many choices, but,I see now, never have I been my journey’s scheduler. I had to accept that, I finally understood, or drop out of the race altogether. As I was unwilling to do the latter, I had to do the former. And I did eventually understand that it might be good that I was not, and would never be, in charge of the clock. So, in the end, Run with Patience declared itself to be a good title, an honest title. But was my hard-learned surrender to God as timekeeper what my journey, and therefore my book, was about? It was only when I reached the end of my manuscript that I had my answer–or, more likely, was willing to accept that, although I had become very fond of "Run with Patience," it reflected only how I wended my way spiritually, not what I learned along the way. The main lesson of my journey was deeper, but also quite obvious once I was willing to see it. My story was, and is, about how God is. Here–and everywhere else. Him and Her–yet One. A mystery–and always available. In our midst–and lonely. Those are some descriptions of lessons I’ve learned on my journey. But all of them are gathered in this one: God belongs to no one. He is my God–and everyone else’s. Belonging to no one, He is the God of all: the God of “us,” and also the God of “them.” If God belongs to no one, but, rather, to everyone, i have learned, She is "nobody's God." And it does--truly--follow that all of us, on our many and different paths, however narrow or wide they happen to be, need to share Him. So my book’s name is now "Nobody’s God." You may as well know that I’m smiling. Because I have just realized something. Call it today's lesson: God, Who gave me faith, also gave me the title of this book.