When we appropriate God's great enablers-His grace and His peace-we can achieve gentleness and calmness even during hard times.

A great snow is the calm death of struggle and the transformative birth of life.

but when a person__ so stuck in their own hole of darkness _ it hurts like hell when someone shines a light on them. Your eyes have to adjust, and let__ just say it isn__ a pleasant experience; it__ why people stay there.

During last night__ insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life_

What I am recommending to the unmarried person, therefore, comes straight out of the Word: Stay out of bed unless you there alone! I know that advice is difficult to put into practice today. But I didn't make the rules. I'm just passing them along. God's moral laws are not designed to oppress us or deprive us of pleasure. They are there to protect us from the devastation of sin, including disease, heartache, divorce, and spiritual death. Abstinence before marriage and fidelity afterward is the Creator's own plan, and no one has devised a way to improve on it.

The utter unbroken silence was more appalling than any ominous noise, than the loudest yells of anguish, than the most piercing screaming...Dead silence.Literally dead.