I don’t mean simply that I “loved the darkness rather than the light because my deeds were evil,” as Jesus says (John 3:19). While that is true, there was deeper magic at work. I loved the darkness because I feared all the good things in the light.

As with so many things, regret can begin as something natural, even beneficial, as you struggle to recover from a wound in your past. But over time, regret can devolve from a sadness to a sickness.

Every year, when this day rolls around, I turn over the stones of remembrance that litter my mind, to see what lurks beneath.

For it is His law I have broken, His office in which I have failed, His people against whom I have sinned. All is from Him, so all I have taken, I have taken from Him. All others against whom I have sinned, I have sinned because they are of Him.

I sin more in thirty minutes than those of the “victorious Christian life” supposedly sin in thirty years.

Why, given all the things we wish God had told us, but didn’t, does he “waste our time” by stating the patently obvious? Was there, in Moses’ day, an outbreak of violence against the disabled?

One day I walked about that place I had tried to make home. I realized it was a prison cell of my own devising.

I was full of pain and empty of speech, babbling like a baby who knows he hurts but can’t explain where or why or what he needs to assuage the anguish. Here was the sheer helplessness of being unable to communicate with God in this moment of deepest desperation.

Let him feel the heft of stone cradled in his palm, and consider the gravity of guilt cast upon the hypocrite.