I can't even tell you how it happened that we sat there and cried hot wet tears, barely looking one another in the eyes. I take much of the blame, though my heart ached with hurt and couldn't find healing. Don't let the sun go down on your anger?

Well, what about when it's not anger you're bedding down for the night? What about when it's joy mixed with mourning so deep you don't know what else to do but be silent? Be silent for fear that your muddled mess of joy and mourning will be trumped by the latter and seen as such. So I kept silent.

A friend tells me a few weeks ago that I present my life as perfect and I want to tell her to read a decade's archives of presentations. This? This place on the web? This is my sanctification in process on view for the world, and if that's perfect, well, I suppose I've arrived a thousand times over.

Once I heard a story of an old man on his death-bed. He was asked if he found himself sinning less as he grew older.

"Sin less?" He asked. "I was never more aware of my sin than I was a moment ago."

"Well, then, do you find it easier to repent?"

"No, son," he said. "I just find the gap between me and the Lord ever closing as I turn."

It was Annie Dillard who said, "Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams?" and I think that gap is here, and here, and this moment, and this one. Eternity streams through these small moments, adding up to one final jubilee, one long trumpet call, when our angers and hurts and fears and sins are bedded forever, never to wake up, not ever.

Do I find myself sinning less the nearer I draw to that final day?

No. I find I know my sin more, and every moment more aware than the last. But do I find it's easier to find God, to know His nearness, and to trust the days to him? Yes. I do.

It doesn't make the hurt less, but this earthly Christian life is not for the avoiding of hurt, but the enduring of it.

...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance... Romans 5:3