Too Much

 Don’t try so hard to make someone feel less guilty, less ashamed, less conflicted about themselves.  You do them a disservice.  True conversion, change of life, comes with the interior struggle or else there will be no real reversal of life badly lived.  I remember when I was in a really bad way.  I called Mommy back home on the other side of the country and said I wanted to come home.  Her response?  “NO.”  It was in the long term the best thing she could have done for me.  An interior struggle, one I would have liked to avoid, got me going on a path, a long path, but a path to a reversal of my life.  Mercy is only gobbled up when we can gaze upon our own inner poverty, our emptiness.  The healing must be deeper than mere whitewashing our shame and guilt.  That can be done with a few drinks.