“I cried, I think, because I was coming to understand in a new way just how much was required of me, how much God was going to strip away all my everything, like silver polish taking the tarnish off old forks. I cried because I know more and more how Chekov was right, how we are all running around desperate to make connections with one another, but mostly we are all just estranged. Because I know more and more that this glass here is so very dark, that this really is a long loneliness, that it is both lonely and long.

Sometimes I feel God has taken a paring knife to me. I know the way an apple feels.”

[Short extract from Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner.]