When I departed Atlanta’s airport the sun was up but blurred by unrelenting heat and haze. The city’s buildings, nested along her overcrowded highways, were as vittles steaming in a southern kettle.

The flights to the West were good, however. The lady at the Delta counter was friendly, dressed in her blue blouse, with an azure rubber wedding band on her left hand. At the TSA Pre ✔ counter the old man with a beer belly and white mustache waved me through quickly. It was apparently evident to him I was military. He barely scanned my military ID card. My rucksack did not signal inspection either as it went through the coffin-like tunnel that, to me anyway, elicits images of a horizontal PET scan.

Once upon the plane I retrieved Smith’s You Are What You Love. I had just begun it an hour or so before but could tell it was my kind of book–biblical, Reformed, and replete with literary allusions, my favorite of which was from Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time (T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”)

Made it out West and am about to turn in for the evening after a few more pages of Jeremy Cooper’s fine novel Brian. Cooper’s somewhat new to me but I am enjoying his Anglican understatement, especially when it comes to themes explored profoundly by Walker Percy, John Updike, and others.

The thought about calling (at least for some): “This is what we were made for: to love what God loves. Our telos brings us back to our beginning. And we were made to be sent” (You Are What You Love, p. 189).