Anne

For several reasons, I started rereading the works of Anne Bradstreet this last week. Though I had read much of her work in college, this time reading it meant more. So many of the fears and struggles that she expressed are ones that I find myself facing. I recognized the fears of my own heart in her poem written before delivering a child. Her questions and conclusions about her faith struck a familiar chord. Her perspective on the suffering in her life, challenged me to keep believing in the goodness of God. In her meditations, she expresses parallels between her daily life and her spiritual life, as I have tried to do here. Reading her work made me feel less lonely. Almost as if she were a kindred spirit that I know only by what I read. As I read her work and feel the blessing of knowing that another has hurt and questioned and believed, I pray that the thoughts that I attempt to capture here will in some small way be a blessing if in no other way than that I will have thought them out more fully and forced them to stand up to the test of logical expression. (At least I hope that it is logical.) I am so thankful that I had the chance to revisit the lovely work of this old friend.