"But sometimes, God, I feel like I'm living in a cloud. I don't know where I am, what I'm doing. Where I'm going."
"But I do, " answers God in my heart. "I know where you are. Where you're going."
God answers me in a voice remarkably like mine. But then,in addition to being Creator of the Universe, God lives in me, so united to me that I know my deepest, truest, inner-most Voice is God.
"I have all these questions - "
"You're not ready for the answers yet. Someday you will be. Just live."
"Well," - and I can't help but get sarcastic, "I don't really have a choice, do I? I have to live through everything. Everything wonderful. Everything frightening. Everything terrible. I have to live."
"Some people give the appearance of living. But they're dead inside. They've turned themselves off. They say they live lives of quiet despair. That's not living. Live everything."
"How can I do that?"
"People who have turned themselves off have turned away from love. Turned away from Me."
Suddenly a flash of insight pierces my soul and I am lifted on a cloud of wonder to look at my life as if it lay stretched before me. At all the people, all the events, that are uniquely mine. How my love for the people in my life meshes with the pain, transforms the pain.
"If I choose to love, I automatically open myself up to pain. To questions," I whisper.
"Is it worth it, do you think?" God asks me a question in return. "Love is terrible, you know, child. Love leads you to the brink of agonizing pain, close to despair sometimes. Because to love is to choose to walk with Me. To walk to where I am. To suffer with. To scream 'Why.' Love will urge you to stay, to not run away, not try to escape, but to continue the journey. Love comes at a dreadful cost of living in a cloud a lot of the time with occasional shafts of sunlight lighting your way."
"And what's the reward?" I ask God back.
I could swear I feel a smile, beginning deep inside and swelling to fill my body so that I glow from within, like one of those clouds outside a plane lit from within by a brilliant sunrise.
"Joy. Peace. Happiness. Trust. Courage. Fulfillment. Intimacy. Union. In a Word, - Me. Beginning now. Lasting forever. Until every tear is dried and every question answered and everyone who chooses Love is whole and one in Me."
I relax in the glow, knowing the Truth when I hear it, because God is Truth, and because I've already begun to live the Truth of Love and know it is the Pearl of Greatest Price.
"Yes, then," I say, knowing I'll have to choose to say "yes" over and over again my entire life. "Yes. I choose to live everything."