This is part two of a series on the arithmetic increase, as one grows older, in unchangeability within the human personality and yet the extraordinary palpable power of absolving grace to stop the decline!

In the same way that perceived personal rejection, especially at a young age, becomes a kind of iron straitjacket defeating almost all attempts to change oneself -- and certainly defeating attempts by other people to try to change you -- in the same way, personal affirmation and one-way love demonstrated towards you when you are "under a cloud" opens that straitjacket immediately and it drops away.

Not that echoes of a prime, early rejection won't be heard again. For they will! But absolving love cuts the cord on it, breaks it off you, unshackles you from its chains, and opens your pores and your veins.

I've seen this again and again, both in the hardening of rejection as an attitude to life and in the "My Chains Fell Off, My Heart Was Free" (C. Wesley) consequence, inside a person, of unconditional, one-way love.

This is especially true, the latter transaction, when love is shown you during a period when you are "under a cloud". Not just depressed affect or "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues", but when the world snares you and shames you and humiliates you and un-forgives you (EVER). That's when the Grace of God, embodied characteristically in the grace of an intervening person, changes you. Personal, affective change that is the result of merciful treatment is the hydrogen-bomb change within a hardened. It is as "sure as the turning of the earth", which is John Wayne's line in 'The Searchers' (1956).

The music for this cast is from Led Zeppelin's inspired second LP, "Led Zeppelin II"; and the cast is dedicated to David B.