“In the same way, I tell you, there is joy among the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
(Luke 15:10)

I wish to make angels rejoice. And now I come to know that a way to bring joy to them is for a sinner to be converted. The snag is that the only sinner I can convert would be myself, and I’m not sure I can be converted. Why, I’m not even sure I am a sinner. Let me see what I can do.

A sinner, what you’d call a sinner, well, I’m not that. And I don’t think there is anybody like that. I’m not a bad person, I do no harm to anybody on purpose, I have no pacts with the devil, and if it’s quite true that I often transgress God’s law and men’s injunctions, it is also true that I don’t do it out of malice but out of weakness, that there is that old matter of the new man and the old man, which is what I am in age, and so I have some right to old habits and weak behaviour; and then that other matter too of not doing the right I want but the wrong I don’t want, which someone more important than me said and so escaped responsibilities and punishments. All that lightens up my burden and makes me feel forgiven.

But then I also know that I could be doing something about it, something that would gladden angels as much as a public sinner’s resounding conversion. I can clean up my thoughts and soften my words, I can smooth out my roughness and hem in my ambitions, I can calm down my storms and level up my depressions, I can lift my mood and liven up my smile, I can shake hands with warmth and kiss cheeks with tenderness, I can share joy with those who see me and faith with those who read me, I can love life a little more and the Lord of life much more. And I know that if I do all that or at least a little bit of it all, or I try to do it and get something done, the angels in heaven will rejoice and sing and dance because someone down here has behaved a little better and has cheered people up.