I thought I knew my mother, but I was wrong. There is a stranger in even the ones we love the most. Intimacy is a limited thing. Some of the loneliest times in life are when we find ourselves going through some inner change that no one else can understand. Children leave home and a mother has to figure out who she is now.
Retirement brings depression, listlessness, aimlessness.
Teenagers and their parents can hardly believe they share the same blood. One day God's touches us with a hand both gentle and overwhelmingly powerful, and suddenly our hearts are filled with yearnings that can seem so strange to those who thought they knew us. Go to college, join the Peace Corps, become a missionary, write poetry, grow your hair long, hike the Appalachian Trail, adopt a Nicaraguan child. I've become a Mary, Christ is growing in me. Mary is now a stranger to Joseph.