The freedom to fall...

The freedom to fall is also the freedom to rise. It's precisely in our failure, our experience of poverty, weakness, emptiness that we come to experience God's restoration and healing love.

You can say, Oh, that's dangerous, it sounds like you're justifying sin. But I'm just trying to be the ultimate realist. Salvation is sin overturned and outdone, as God expands and educates our true freedom.

Free will and freedom of conscience are at the heart of the doctrine of grace and at the center of Christian morality.

Richard Rohr, from The Price of Peoplehood

Sin is behovely - it had to be - but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well...

...I understood that our Lord looks upon his servant with pity, not with blame. For this passing life does not ask that we live completely without blame and sin. He loves us endlessly, and we sin continually, and he shows us our sin most tenderly. And we sorrow and mourn with discretion and turn to look upon his mercy, clinging to his love and goodness, knowing he is our medicine, understanding that we do nothing but sin.

And so we are able to please him, through the humbleness we get from seeing our sin, and we can faithfully understand his endless love, and can praise and thank him...

Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long Text) Chapters 27 & 82 Tr. Sheila Upjohn

If I can add anything to such words, it is simply that I have found them to be true. There is nothing I have done - and there are many things I wish I had not done - that God has not used in the end for my healing, and to show me his mercy in Christ's love. As far as I can see, it's the only way we can ever get to say, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me..." (Galatians 2.19-20) "for [I] have died, and [my] life is hidden with Christ in God." (Colossians 3.3)