Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow.

Every Saint has a past. Every Sinner, has a future.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

We are much more forgiving of those who are willing to come clean right away.

Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes - and most fools do - but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one's mistakes.

Sin always splits the self to some degree, yes. You know that you have harmed yourself and others, but you probably are not going to come to terms with that because you're carrying on a charade of righteousness, even if you don't believe it. So confession is very deep in the process of discovering the soul.

The effect of the rupture that sin created in the relationship between the man and the woman is this: mistrust, anger, and disappointment became the standard quality of human life. Even

This can also be a time of confession, in which you ask for the strength to deal with the failures you experience day by day.

He ruined soul must be willing to recognize its own ruin before it can discover how to enter a different path.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.

We are not only asking to be forgiven, we are asking for guidance and wisdom and strength to respond differently tomorrow.