There comes upon me sometimes the paranoia. It is a doomsday clock that threatens to ring, and sometimes I believe that, it on the cusp of midnight, the gongs will peal and my world will end. (It never does ring, I must say, that doomsday clock. As if it is stopped at three seconds before hitting the fatal 12.) That paranoia has every seeming that of all the visions I have had, all the good and holy that I have seen, that my visions were never what they told, and all the good threatens to sink into ill, into dark and stinking evil. All sound is that I have been fooled for this whole time, that I have no chance whatsoever at being one of the just, one of the saved. That I have no hope at all in all the world.
It is that last point, though, where the paranoia never can win. I have always hope, somehow. It has much to do with my Lord, one Jesus Christ, whom, though I have not truly ever seen Him, there is a light that beams from Heaven that shines into my heart of hearts. And though that light I do not visibly perceive it, I know that that light is there, always — a ray of hope, even when things around me (as when my madness surrounds completely my psyche) seem the darkest. And if I am to fall from a height that I have reached in my perpetual climb through this life, suddenly many rungs below where I had reached through patient hand over hand, somehow I feel I will make it. I climb.
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