Snookered.

See, the thing about being saved is that it’s not an absolution.  You aren’t swept back from the cliff’s edge and wrapped in a cosmic swaddling, rocked into unseeing bliss.  What you are is placed back firmly onto a path.  A long one.  Back from the edge, back from the place of giving up on the work of this lifetime, you are nudged—not so gently, but not without compassion—onto a path that will require of you work for the rest of your lifetime.

The cliff’s edge, the leap from it, the ultimate sacrifice as it might be called is the choice to give up all the work that will ever be asked of you.  It is to say, Forget it, too hard, too much, there’s no help, no hope.  To be placed back onto the path you had made some kind of decision—by omission or commission—to leave means that you are now responsible to take up the work you’d abandoned.  It is to look up from your crumpled knees and see winding before you the path of your lifetime, the work that will surely be needed to accomplish it, and the knowledge that to be alive is to do that work.

To be alive is to agree.  To be alive is to sign an agreement daily that you will, however falteringly, place one foot before the other.  To be alive is to agree that you yourself and your life are more worthwhile than eliminating all the possibilities it holds, all the better and all the worse. 

And so, pulled back from the edge, “saved” as it were, you walk with a grim humor, knowing that somewhere you have chosen this.