Frederick Buechner Sermon Illustration: The Way He Carries Me

In our blog post every Monday we select a reading from the  Revised Common Lectionary for the upcoming Sunday, and pair it with a Frederick Buechner reading on the same topic.

Next Sunday we will celebrate the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.  Here is this week's reading from the book of Psalms: 

Psalm 138:3

On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.

The following excerpt was originally published in  Wishful Thinking  and later in  Beyond Words:

There must be a God because (a) since the beginning of  history the most variegated majority of people have intermittently  believed there was; (b) it is hard to consider the vast  and complex structure of the universe in general and of the  human mind in particular without considering the possibility  that they issued from some ultimate source, itself vast, complex, and somehow mindful; (c) built into the very being of  even the most primitive man there seems to be a profound  psychophysical need or hunger for something like truth,  goodness, love, and—under one alias or another—for God  himself; and (d) every age and culture has produced mystics  who have experienced a Reality beyond reality and have  come back using different words and images but obviously  and without collusion describing with awed adoration the  same Indescribability.