Faith

"Her own marriages had consumed years of learning how to walk beside her husband, and how to let him lead without making her feel that her only gift was to follow.........

"Did you bring me an answer to my question? The one of what was wrong with me that the baptismal water hadn't washed away my worries?"

"Ah, that one," he said. "I think I have a better answer now, better than what I said before."

"You didn't," she said.

"It isn't the water," he told her. "It's the love that washes."

"And my worries? Is this a sign that my faith is frail, weak as old bones ready to be ash?"

"Not your faith in God, Madame Toupin. But perhaps the confidence in your own worthiness, that you deserve a life of hope. Life is not made up of smooth waters alone. But of troubles and celebrations, of living through lost loves, noticing wrong turns, letting others help you turn around. Finding the lessons whenever they're offered, not just when you thought you were ready. Living looks like what you did: You took in gifts and then gave them away."

by Jane Kirkpatrick, Hold Tight the Thread, third in a trilogy about Madame Marie Dorion Venier Toupin, a French Indian woman who traveled from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean in 1814, just a few years after Sacajawea traveled with Lewis and Clark.

An amazing woman, this Madame Dorion...and Jane Kirkpatrick...and perhaps even me.