I am more evil than I ever could have feared,
More loved than I ever could have imagined.
(unknown quote)

Why

This pain, the cascading struggles, endless unanswered whys
is it well worth a future exchange?

Anticipating a fading promise...
it sure seems so.

I certainly didn't want this!
But He does.

His reason?
Refining, purifying, freedom!

I groan and grieve
like a kidney stone, this too shall pass

Hope in hopelessness
anxious patience

Reaching for whisps of relief
maybe a distraction, but no comfort at all

People, things and stuff
what a disappointment!

A promised companion groans with me
He intercedes... at His discretion
A Comforter unseen

Romans 8:18-27

Narcissism

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

Oscar Wilde

Transformation

W. H. Auden, “We would rather be ruined than changed; we would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

Vain Pride

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Percy Bysshe Shelley