Chalk it up to God's Mercy

The other night my wife and I attended a Lenten mission put on by our local parish. The priest who was leading it was talking about God's mercy and started off by telling about a dream he had the night before. He dreamt he was standing at the pearly gates with St Peter. Beside him he saw the top of a spiral staircase which went all the way down to hell. St Peter gave the priest a piece of chalk and told him that getting into Heaven was really quite simple. He simply needed to take the chalk and write down each one of his sins on a separate step. If he ran out of sins before reaching the bottom, then he could come back up to Heaven. So the priest started writing down his sins on each step and after a while he saw our parish priest heading toward him up the stairs. "Don't worry, I'm just going up for more chalk," our parish priest said. At this everyone broke into laughter.