Amen twice!
Each person picks a five-letter word and keeps it to himself. Then you take turns guessing each other’s word. When you guess, the other person tells you how many letters in your guess are also in the secret word. So little by little you can deduce and eliminate until you know which letters are eliminated and which are in the secret word.
What's my point? What is this, Parent Magazine or what?
My alleged point is that sometimes you make a guess that is entirely wrong. The first time I did that I was crestfallen. But then I realized I had eliminated 5 letters in just one guess.
Sometimes — through frowardness, ignorance, carelessness, or, face it, just plain cussedness — we do something entirely one hundred per cent WRONG!
Pretty humiliating. This “just as I am without one plea” stuff is fine as long as we're secretly telling ourselves that we have LOTS of pleas only we're WAY too modest to bring them up. But when it's true, when it's undeniable, when you've been surfing porn or filching from work or cutting the corners a wee bit too sharply or being funky to the spouse, the parents, the small fry, or all of the above ... Ooh! Hard! Without even one tiny eensy weensy little plea!
I really have NOT ONE PLEA!
OW!
But Jesus pleads from me. And even when I recover my conceit and go right back to my strutting, he still pleads for me.
I used to say I want to die before the parousia so that I can stand next to Jesus and point out the bad guys when He comes.
I think we're all really lucky that God is in the God business and not me. He desires not the death of a sinner but that we should turn from our vanity (and all the rest) and live.
And no, He doesn't need my advice on whom to punish and how to punish them.
Praise Him for filling up our nothingness with his abundance, shaken down, pressed together, running over.