Your and your smiles are all I live for.

If Christ is all that's good, then there can be nothing good apart from him.
Therefore, when we are apart from Christ, or are under the illusion that we are withdrawn from the presence of Christ, nothing good can exist.
Therefore, nothing good is in us when we are apart from Christ.
Nothing in us is good when Christ is not with us.

That is why I'm so terrified of stepping out of the lines God's created for me: I'm terrified of myself to the point of nightmares. My own person is nothing apart from God. Nothing I do will be good apart from God. All plans I start apart from God will fail.

When I am in God's light I see Jesus in the mirror, because He gave himself for my life and God sees His reflection in my heart when I honestly seek his ways and accept his grace.
When I am out of God's light I see the girl from The Exorcist. If you want nightmares type that into Google. You'll see what I look like. What you look like.

Every day I choose to die to what I want in order to get what I need, which is always graciously and abundantly (as well as undeservedly) provided to me by Christ. Every moment I have to die in order to let Christ live in me. I have to hold myself by the neck with a deathgrip every single day of my life until my last breath. If I let my real nature take the best of me for even one second, I lose it all. Every moment for me is like a moment spent in a pit with lions. Whom I will gladly allow to rip apart my body, knowing that they cannot take my soul.
...etc.

I just want to apologize to everyone I might have hurt today. May I quote our recent scripture?
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do...As it is, it is no longer i myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
Please forgive me. I try my best for You (and you, both of yous at the same time for the same purpose). I'm always trying to put You and you above myself, in that order. As much as I say that I would carry Your heaviest cross and take your toughest AP test just so You and you wouldn't have to go through it, that type of self-sacrificial love is only tested by time. Real love, whose path I deviate from oh-so-many times.
On one hand, You know what's in my heart before I think it or write it.
On the other hand, you won't get to read this until much later. Just know that this was here all along.

--E.A.