When did Adam first feel the full weight of what he’d done? Did it come to him in small steps and stages, a little at a time much like the sick man who slowly recovers, each day almost imperceptibly gaining new strength until he finally wakes up one morning to realize he is as healthy as he ever was? Or did the revelation, the weight of it all, come to Adam in one sudden and frightful glimpse into the heart of God, like the drunkard who suddenly becomes aware, in one single, blinding moment of clarity, that he cannot remember the last time he woke up and did not crave wine or exactly when that craving first began but who knows now that he is totally and completely a different man from that one he vaguely recalls as if in a dream? How his heart must have shuddered with fear the day the dread of what he’d done settled fully onto his small and mortal frame!
And here I bear the weight of my own.
