Verbully Growing up as a naively tough kid, I did my share of ignorant things to feel better about myself. One of those things was to insult a classmate who lived nearby. He was a few years younger and had skipped a grade when he transferred to my school. He was overweight, intelligent, and in every way undeserving of anything I said of him. But when I found out that he was adopted, for some reason I said that his mother didn't love him.

His mother, already over-protective, called my house when he came home in tears that day. I did not want her to speak to my mother, so I pressed the handset down on the cradle gently, then picked it back up. She was still there. So I unplugged the telephone from the wall, then ran upstairs to unplug the one in the office too. But it was ringing. And by the time I got there, they were talking.

When we are ashamed of something we've done, sometimes we spend more effort trying to hide it than simply to face it. When you spend all your time covering your tracks, you make no progress forward.  ¶ 6:03 AM