ryan reid

“Yeah, you wish,” she said with a smirk. She pecked me on the cheek. “Just you. But next time I want to be naked.” There she goes again with the “next time” stuff, I thought. “Now get out of here so I can clean up and come back to earth before my next class. I zipped up her dress as we went to the door. She twisted the lock, peeked into the hall to make sure no one was there and pushed me out. “I’ll see you next class.”

Remember her? How could I ever forget a woman like her? I racked my sluggish brain, trying to think. I'd gone out somewhere, alone. Maggie had stayed home with the kids. But where... the client party! Celebrating the big deal we'd just closed! That was it. I'd gone to the client party, and I'd met...

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.