The trouble, as far as I was concerned, was that her sense of unworthiness was infectious. Obsessed with her own lack of any virtue worth praising, my mother did not have it in her to persuade us children that there was any virtue in us worth noting either. Small wonder, I suppose, that as a boy I was thoroughly convinced that God held his nose as he passed me by and if, by chance, he gave me a second look, he had to resist an impulse to turn me into a pillar of salt.

Lewis B. Smedes, My God and I