The Price of "After"

I've always loved before-and-after stories and before-and-after pictures. Maybe that love for before-and-after was one of the reasons I was comfortable with Christianity - the eternal promise of an "after" for every "before". What I wasn't prepared for was the price an "after" can exact.

Somewhere in my little pea brain, I must have assumed that by my 5th decade, I would have dealt with most of the major "befores" and would be luxuriating in a life well lived. Instead, I am finding (hitherto-unknown-to-me)"befores" that have infected my cells, invaded my pores, and enveloped the air I breath like a fog. How can this be? I am drop-jaw mute in the face of this revelation.

So as I inch towards tentatively acknowledging that I had it all wrong - that my blacks could be whites and my whites could be black, I take a deep breath and think, "I might want to get use to this - this might be the price one pays if one wants to keep having 'afters'."