Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

* For a very large part of my youth I thought the point of being a Christian was to keep bad things from happening to me. After all, the Old Testament has all these covenants, "If you ___, then God will ____." So if I did all the right things, kept all the rules, did all the things asked of me, then God would protect me and take care of me and keep me safe. I could manipulate the creator of the universe into being my own personal caretaker. Imagine my surprise, and anger, as I encountered more, and more, pain and suffering in my own life. God was supposed to make me happy. He was supposed to keep my parents marriage together, he was supposed to keep me from feeling sad all the time for no apparent reason. God was failing to hold up his end of the bargain, and so, maybe I was done with God. Only in the wealthy west could a spoiled little girl hold onto the notion, for any length of time, that it's possible to live a life without suffering. But I see the same so