You said it Clive. . .

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

- Clive Staples Lewis, The Four Loves. 1960.

Looking back through these archives, and seeing what I have written and attempted and in many ways prevailed upon so thoroughly that even I am moved by my success, I must apologize for a record of a journey that I hope few need take and all escape.

Welcome to hell.

If you follow the paths I tread, to emerge unscathed is to lose all, and to be wounded deeply and still find a pulsing, throbbing, bleeding bundle of hope at the bottom of a pile of wrongs is to win the greatest victory of your life.

I suddenly desire a victory of my own.

If you pray dear reader, I would beg of you--pray for me now.

The hardest part of the road lies yet ahead; for who among us has voluntarily exited hell?