We could compare our indiscretions.

How much happier, though, that I can identify with your astonishment and gratitude and know exactly what you mean and how you feel.

I too have been in receipt of God's Grace. Most often this comes through the people who care. I too am grateful.

...and like the poet said, "Hope springs eternal."

It is a humbling and difficult place to be, yet somehow I feel strangely alive. Perhaps because of that which I needed to deaden in the process of compromise.
JOA

" We could compare our indiscretions.

How much happier, though, that I can identify with your astonishment and gratitude and know exactly what you mean and how you feel. "

Dr. Donald, that was beautiful. Downright quotable. A perfect comment, if it were not for one thing: when you quote Shakespeare, "Poet" is capitalized.

As for responses: when I have something to admit, I often imagine the reactions will be proportionate to the offensiveness of my crime, but this is rarely the case. Instead it is like alcohol, greater quantities only causing greater effects up to a point, but then absorbing at a constant rate no matter how much you've taken in. This is usually preferable, since it gives you time to drink some water, eat a loaf of bread, and get yourself on to a couch; but it's an awful feeling to know that you're just going to lose more and more control no matter what you do, and that until all that alcohol has been absorbed things are just going to get worse until (if you drank enough) you just die.

I guess what I'm saying is that human grace is like a cool washcloth on a sick forehead, but it takes divine grace to actually make things better.

Dan

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

-Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733

I didn't know that about Shakespeare. Thanks. Pope probably also deserves capitalization.   

I read the Shawshank Redemption by Steven King many (13) years ago. It ended with this same quote and it was a time when I really needed to hear it. I remember having tears in my eyes because I had dared to hope against all odds. A few days later, I entered rehab. My hope was not in vain.

Damn, from the title I was expected a pornographic article.

thanks Mason  , sometimes human grace comes pretty damned close to divine. God bless comic relief.

"I didn't know that about Shakespeare. Thanks. Pope probably also deserves capitalization. "

I am humbled--I really thought that was Shakespeare. Please accept my apologies; I spoke too soon. (But that's the first time I've ever done that. Really...)

Dan