The Kiss

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  “Ryabovitch pulled the bed-clothes over his head, curled himself up in bed, and tried to gather together the floating images in his mind and to combine them into one whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him and made him happy—that something extraordinary, foolish, but joyful and delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even in his sleep. When he woke up the sensations of oil on his neck and the chill of peppermint about his lips had gone, but joy flooded his heart just as the day before.” The Kiss By Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

The Weight of Sin

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A flippant youth once asked a preacher, "You say that people carry a weight of sin. I feel nothing. How heavy is sin? It is ten pounds? Eighty pounds?"

The preacher replied, "If you laid a four hundred pound weight on a corpse, would it feel the load?"

The youth replied, "It would feel nothing, because it is dead."

The preacher concluded, "That spirit, too, is indeed dead which feels no load of sin or is indifferent to its burden and flippant about its presence."

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