Life Story

When people tell me their life story from misery to sanity, my mind often checks out when they spend  so much time in the minutiae of their past miseries and escapades.  I am not their biographer.  I don't need all that. a couple of brief stories make the point.  What I look for is how they got well.  That is, I want to experience some hope, some sense of grace in another person's life.  This is why I love conversion stories.  Things are bad and getting worse.  Life looks hopeless.  Insanity hides behind destructive actions that look like solutions.  Then there is a change.  Something unexpected happens.  I call it grace.  It comes from a source, energy, power that was not in evidence until that moment.  Then there is the gradual improvement in life, with lots of discipline, spiritual focus, and good habits replacing bad ones.  I don't spend too much time in past insanity, just enough to know I don't want to go back there.  The present is all I have, and that is a gift.