A Short Story

‘Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.’[1]

That was what the card said. White cardstock, typewriter font. Tucked under the edge of the saucer beside the morning’s mug like a benediction. Or maybe a dare. Maybe both. It had the feel of something left just for her, though she’d learned by now that most holy things are both deeply personal and wholly common, like bread, like grief, like the way people show up without quite meaning to.

Mara had found it waiting for her at the window seat, left as always by the café owner, a man who preferred to deal in questions rather than names. No one ever saw him place the cards, they simply appeared, like dew, or like God, if you believe in that sort of thing. Some said he used to be a teacher, or a vicar, or a chess champion, depending on the day’s speculation. All Mara knew was that the cards never repeated, and the tea was always just hot enough to make you wait.

She tucked the card into the inner pocket of her coat with the reverence one gives to something not entirely understood but not quite dismissible either. Like a child’s drawing that looks suspiciously like your own face. Outside, the high street murmured its usual opening lines. Buses wheezed, pigeons paraded, the great clock struck an hour no one had asked for. The sky was fretting, the way October skies often do, caught between remembering summer and rehearsing winter. The air smelled faintly of woodsmoke from the canal boats and of wet leaves. The scent of endings pretending to be beginnings.

Across from her, a man in a charcoal coat sat so still he might have been part of the furniture. Not reading. Not eating. Just sitting, the way someone sits when they are trying very hard not to become a story. A canvas rucksack lay at his feet, worn down at the corners like someone who’s carried more than he meant to. He had his hands around a paper cup, which looked like it was just a little too hot to hold comfortably. They used to be polystyrene and usable.  There was a slowness to his stillness, the kind that makes you think of a man remembering how to be alive after having forgotten for a while. She saw him without meaning to, which is how we usually notice the most important people in our lives. Not in fireworks, but in peripheral vision.

Mara was late. But for her, late usually meant on time, in that slightly dishevelled, always-arriving way some people manage to make into a philosophy. Her job at the church office involved youth mentoring, or more truthfully, the documentation of youth mentoring. Bullet points. Grant applications. Measurable outcomes. Outcomes that fit neatly into templates and newsletters but rarely, if ever, lived in the mess and wonder of actual lives. She often felt like a translator hired to turn mystery into data. She was good at all of it, which is often how you know it isn’t your calling. The better you are at pretending, the more convincing the disguise.

She stood to leave and the man in the coat lifted his head, not abruptly, but as though hearing a sound the rest of the world had not yet registered. Their eyes touched for a moment, a fleeting contact, like someone brushing past you on a crowded street. But in that instant, something passed between them. The kind of soul-deep recognition people have when they realize, against all odds, they are still alive.

Outside, the morning tasted of frost and possibility. The woodsmoke hung in the air. Somewhere, someone was burning yesterday’s burdens. Mara passed a florist setting buckets of lilies on the pavement and thought how they looked like trumpets raised to announce a resurrection that most people were too busy to notice. The bakery across the way was beginning to breathe out the day’s first miracle, the smell of bread still mid-psalm. As she turned down the canal, a heron, absurd and regal, stood on a lock gate like a misplaced exclamation mark.

Back in the church office, the thermostat pretended not to know it was autumn. The air was cool in that officious way, filed air, air with expectations. The walls were the colour of the café’s tea, left too long to brew in order to cool down.

Brendan, the vicar, popped his head around the corner with his usual pastorally trained cheer. It was the kind of cheer that had weathered funerals and malfunctioning boilers and too many budget meetings. “Staff at ten,” he said. “You’ve got the mentoring update?” Mara nodded, the laminated sheet already in her hand.

But something else was with her too, tucked under her ribcage like a pebble in a shoe. A faint ache. Not quite pain. Not exactly longing. More like appetite. Hunger disguised as duty. Or maybe the other way around. As if her soul had begun whispering something in a language her job did not speak.

They prayed the usual staff prayers. Half sincere, half performed. God was taking minutes. She thought of the boy who always turned the prayer sheet upside down, saying that it made more sense that way. There was something in that, she thought. The world does sometimes make more sense upside down.

After prayers they all dispersed to their duties, the sacred and the scheduled folded together like origami. Mara sat at her desk and stared at the cursor blinking, like a very polite but persistent tap on the shoulder. Outside her office window, a gardener pushed a wheelbarrow through the churchyard, whistling an indecisive tune. The sound passed through the glass and into her like a reminder that the world was continuing somewhere just beyond the range of her workday. She clicked away, pulled out the card from her pocket again, and beneath the printed words she scribbled something in her own hand.

‘Go where your best prayers take you.’[2]

She stared at the sentence, as if it had been sent to her by someone who knew what she didn’t yet know she needed to remember. It felt like a letter from her future self, one who had already made the leap.

At lunch she walked down the canal path to the river, because sometimes you need to prove to yourself the river still moves. The water shouldered its way around the stones, indifferent to theology. The heron was there again, stood like a paper sculpture on a half-submerged branch, then folded itself into flight and disappeared into the sky with the kind of elegance that makes you wish you believed in miracles.

She walked past the iron bridge, the weeping willows, the small bench where someone had carved “Still here, 2011.” She thought of the boy who hadn’t called back, the girl who wrote poems she would not read aloud, and the slow weight of the mentoring program that had turned, somehow, into a masterclass in managing paperwork. Success was now defined by how tidy her reports were, not how the children’s stories unfolded.

She leaned on the railing and watched the water. And that was when the man from the café reappeared, as if on cue. He cleared his throat with an apologetic cough, the kind of cough you use when you’re about to say something real.

“Excuse me,” he said. He held out the card. “You dropped this.”

She had, it turned out, put it in the wrong pocket. She took it with more care than it required.

“Thank you.”

He nodded, already turning to go. But some moments are unrepeatable, and you know it even as they’re happening.

“Wait,” she said. “Do you ever feel…” She hesitated. How do you say it without sounding ridiculous? “Restless?”

He looked at the water, then back at her, and said it plain. “Sometimes I think doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”[3]

She laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was true. And briskly, unembarrassedly so.

“Buechner,” she said. He shrugged in a way that acknowledged more than agreement. “Yes.”

They walked along the river like old friends who hadn’t yet exchanged names. The silence between them felt roomy, not awkward. It was the kind of silence that holds a presence rather than an absence. At one point a crow swept overhead, tearing black shapes out of the sky.

“Do you believe in signs?” she asked.

“I believe,” he said, “that coincidences are God’s way of getting our attention. But I think God is subtle, and we are stubborn, so sometimes the coincidences have to get quite loud.”[4]

They stopped at the footbridge. The town’s initials were woven into the ironwork as though letters could persuade a river to hold still. She turned to him. “My name’s Mara.”

He hesitated. “I’m Thomas.”

It wasn’t a grand moment. But it was real. She said his name like a benediction: “Hello, Thomas.”

He tapped the card. “That first line, good, honest medicine. My wife used to keep a little box on our mantel, filled with slips like that. Every morning she’d put one on the fridge. Like checking the weather, except the weather was inside you.”

“Used to?” she asked.

He blinked, surprised by his own answer. “Two years. She died in late autumn. The afternoons were healing and brutal at the same time.”

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded. “She believed love is the frame we see people in.[5] That’s what she used to say. Especially about your kind of work. The frame matters.”

They walked back together. When they reached the church gate, he said quietly, “You know, when she died, I thought the story was over. But it turns out the story keeps writing you whether you’re in the mood or not. In fact if you listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”[6]

She nodded, understanding more than she could say. “Maybe that’s what grace is,” she said. “And the story that keeps going, even when you’ve stopped believing in it.”

That evening, Mara went home through the market, bought oranges, bread, and silence. She turned off the radio. She let the room be a room.

On the mantel, the card. On the table, a notebook she’d bought for a different purpose. She opened it, wrote:

‘A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.’[7]

She wasn’t sure why, only that it felt like arithmetic done by mercy.

Over the next few days, she noticed small things she’d been missing. A woman feeding birds with the precision of a surgeon, a boy on a scooter singing off-key hymns, the way the postman whistled in minor keys when it rained. The ordinary world had begun humming at a slightly higher pitch.

In the weeks that followed, winter rehearsed its role. Lights strung across the square like a half-believed hope. Teenagers thudded through the church hall like thunder in sneakers. Some days she felt like a shepherd of spreadsheets. Other days, like a custodian of respectable panic.

But the notebook grew. Not with grand ideas or exit strategies, but with small, stubborn acts of attention, a note for the cleaner who came before dawn, the names of people who didn’t wear name tags, and listening to an old man’s story as if it were water and she were thirsty

She wrote: “Turn around and believe the good news.” Then underlined it. Then added, “The good news might be as small as a boiled egg carried to a neighbour.”[8]

And something began to shift in her. Not a conversion, exactly, but a softening. Like thaw beneath the snowline. She began to see her own tired work, her own town, as a place already being redeemed, quietly, in ordinary acts of noticing.

She saw Thomas again, weeks later, in the café. He looked different, not happier, exactly, but less armoured. The grief had worn into him like sea glass, no longer sharp but still glinting when the light hit it. She sat opposite him, placed her notebook on the table.

“What are you building?” he asked, eyeing the pages like blueprints.

“Not sure,” she said. “Maybe… a room with a table laid for two.”

He nodded. Not romantically. Hospitably. “A room like that,” he said, “is a place where you can say hard things without flinching. A place where, when anger comes, the skeleton at the feast is you, you can recognize it before it eats you.”[9]

She smiled. “You know your Buechner.”

He smiled back. “My wife had a crush on his sentences. She said they turned the dimmer half a turn. And the room, well, it was the same, and not the same.”

They talked about ordinary miracles, about the café owner’s cards, the weather that refused to decide on a season, how memory sometimes feels like a place you can walk back into if you’re quiet enough. He told her how his daughter had started sending him postcards from cities he’d never visit, each one with a single word written on it. Courage. Patience. Enough. He kept them in a shoebox by the door. “It’s her way of checking the weather,”[10] he said.

One late afternoon in February, Mara found Thomas in the church. He sat at the end of the pew, eyes open during the prayers, as if listening to someone who preferred not to be seen. Afterward, they walked beneath the great clock as it chimed its old argument with time.

“Do you suppose,” she asked, “that anything’s changed? I mean… because of us? A notebook and a bench?”

He thought about it. Long enough for her to suspect he meant to answer truthfully.

“I think,” he said, “that change is a word too tidy for what grace does. Grace doesn’t change things so much as reveal where the living is already happening, and invite you to live there too.”

“Which is where?” she asked.

He gestured at the square. The pigeons. The oranges in the market. The river. The man who would eat one on a bench. “Which is here,” he said.

They stood a while longer in the cold, the kind of cold that makes faces honest. Somewhere nearby, a bus sighed, and the sound seemed to bless them both.

That night, back home, she wrote in her notebook: Maybe faith isn’t certainty but hunger kept company.

Then, beneath it: And maybe prayer is just learning to notice what you already have.

She closed the notebook, set it beside the card, and went to the window. The town was quiet, wrapped in its small lights. She could almost hear the world breathing.

Then she turned to go. At the corner, she stopped. Took out the card again.

Read it one last time—not because she didn’t know it by heart, but because saying it aloud made her remember where she was.

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” She slipped it back into her pocket. And this time, when she walked on, it felt, at last, like the same thing as walking where she was called.

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[1] Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith

[2] Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

[3] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

[4] Frederick Buechner then developed further by Anne Lamott, Coincidence: The Big Permission Slip from God?

[5] Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

[6] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

[7] Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

[8] Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction

[9] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

[10] The weather theme is drawn from Fredrick Buechner’s observation about living life is a bit like protecting against the weather in Telling Secrets