Words to live up to

So if you know me very well at all, you will know that my all-time favorite book is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I adore everything about it. I try to read it every couple of years, and the one thing on my "Bucket List" is to read it in French. (Not doing so well on that goal, by the way...)

I brought it with me to Haiti, and now that things will be slowing down around CMBH, I will bury myself in it. I started a couple of nights ago, and was touched once again by the description in the beginning of Monseigneur Bienvenu, a bishop that the locals call "Father Welcome." I would love it if someday I was described by these words:

• "As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil. No matter how much money came to him, he never had enough. And then he robbed himself."
• "On his visits he was indulgent and gentle, and he preached less than he talked. He made virtue accessible. He never used far-fetched examples or reasoning."
• "He was equally at home in a cottage and on the mountains. He could say the loftiest things in the simplest language; and as he could speak all dialects, his words penetrated every soul."
• "He behaved the same with the rich as with the poor."
• "He was indulgent toward women and the poor, upon whom the weight of society falls most heavily."
• "[He] could be called at all hours to the bedside of the sick and the dying."
• "Widowed or orphaned families did not need to send for him; he came on his own."
• "Clearly, he had his own strange way of judging things. I suspect he acquired it from the Gospels."