"Yet the revolution starts in my own openness to change, to others, to the possible, to the difficult. I tell myself that that is someone else's problem, someone else's gift, someone else's call. I tell myself anything it takes to avoid another major change in my own life.

"I have decided that security is my sin but not only my sin. We humans cling like barnacles to yesterday as if heaven were behind us rather than ahead. We measure all good by the good we have today. We allow our little successes to dominate our vision. We fail to see that more is possible. We make ourselves God and wonder why we don't recognize God when the God of conversion comes again to stretch our souls. We take the past as our standard and run the risk of being smothered by it in our tracks.

"The God of the Dance beckons us out of the caves of the soul to faith and trust and new beginnings. But we prefer the dark. We miss the holy-making mystery of the dark. We avoid the holy demands that darkness brings and allow it instead to decay into depression. My journal was clear: 'Somehow we need to retain what is valuable from the past and move with courage and vigor into the future.' Jean Blomquist wrote. I responded:

"It's when we get trapped in the past — in its details, and its shame, and its narrow boxes and short leashes — that life stops for us. When life is defined for us by others, we limit our sense of ourselves. Then we dismiss the God of Possibility from our lives. We refuse to become the more we are. We sit on the dung heap of the past and make it our present. We fail to believe that God is. That God is in us. That God is calling us out of the darkness into the light.

"Darkness is one of the ways to God, provided we see it as leading to the light. Provided we don't turn it into the death of our own soul."