Ironically, I am most grateful for two things I normally try to avoid: guilt and fear … yet guilt and fear are such powerful forces that they may also deceive. In my case, they deceived me into seeing God as my enemy.

Virtue, unlike innocence, has successfully passed a point of temptation.

Name Withheld

I was sitting in an aisle seat on a cross-country flight when the passenger across the aisle, one row ahead, pulled out a magazine from his briefcase. I recognized something familiar in the furtive way he looked around, nervously adjusted his posture, and opened the magazine. He held the pages open just far enough to see inside, but from my angle I had a clear view of various women spreading their legs for the camera.

It seemed incongruous, even bizarre, for a man dressed in a business suit to be studying some anonymous woman's private parts in the artificial setting of jammed-together airplane seats and plastic folding trays. But after the sense of the bizarre had passed, I felt another ...