This I Prefer

“Whatever energies I may or may not have, I know one thing for certain: that I could not
devote them to anything else I should think entirely worth doing. Indeed nothing else seems
interesting enough, nothing to repay the labor, but the telling of my fellow-men about the one
man who is the truth, and to know whom is the life. Even if there be no hereafter, I would live
my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. No facts can take the place
of truths; and if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold
by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and
John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make
even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go
farther, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live
forevermore believing as those that deny him.”

From “Telling Secrets” by Frederick Buechner, *Thomas Wingfold, Curate, by George MacDonald (New York, George Routledge, 1876, pp. 490-91)