"Because God is first; God is always first and makes the first move. 

God is a bit like the almond flower of your Sicily, Antonio, which always blooms first."

~Pope Francis, in his interview with Antonio Sparado, S.J. 

driftwood

The lover is like the craftsman:
he has to give himself to years of discipline, of patient work and perseverance, in order to attain his skill. There must be countless new beginnings, the exacting process of habit-forming, with its repeated denials of self, until at last his mind and eye and hand work in harmony on the material that he knows, as he knows his own soul. Just so is the lot of the lover, who has life for his material, life that sin has twisted, so that it is like wood that is knotted and warped. Yet on this material he acquires the skill that makes the craftsman an artist and enables him to fashion his own life into a thing of sheer beauty, and not his own life only, but the lives of those dear to him.  Inevitably, in the process, he will have enlarged and strengthened his heart and mind; his hand will have become sensitive and capable, his eyes will be trained eyes that see the loveliness in the world, that others are blind to. His home will be the little house that is built upon a rock, which stands fast when the rains come and the winds blow and the houses built upon sand are swept away.

-Caryll Houselander-