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I believe it’s because he was a painfully honest man—honest before God, honest about himself, and an honest observer of others.
As you observe the Patient, you will see a Christian woman’s victory—a victory that can be yours in Christ Jesus.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
Just be thankful it’s been exposed, repent, and move on.
What gratification! To bring something so theoretically “lovely” to such treacherous depths.
anyway, a little hope now and then never hurts them; only lays down sediment for the stone layers of future despair
A home of the worst kind. Here she saw peace, and laughter, and the fruit of long years of ministry and commitment. She was hugged by a woman with another kind of open and bright expression. She was listened to. The Enemy’s book was opened to her. One of R’s big protests later on was, “She already saw the book! She saw it a thousand times and heard it! How could I (or anyone) know it would be dangerous to her now? One can never tell when the Enemy will run a stealth operation of this kind
But give her a few months in captivity, and we believe she will begin to yearn for the freedom of Chaos again.
She’s becoming vaguely dismayed that her young husband seems to have forgotten his indebtedness to her for marrying him.
No one is watching them now, you see. They are not the bride and groom, surrounded by photographers and cakes, envious friends and gratified family. Now they are only Him and Her, Adam and Eve.
They conclude that praising the one praiseworthy thing would in some sense excuse or incentivize the other reprehensible things.
It’s quite simple to encourage her in this belief, to make the praise stick in her throat. Incite her to build up an imaginary man in her mind—a flawless captain she knows she could passionately, unreservedly, and wholeheartedly commend in every area of life. Then encourage her to wait for this man to arrive on the scene before she opens her mouth in praise.
he will usually slouch to meet a woman’s disapproval and grow to meet her praise. Men simply don’t respond to criticism the way women believe they will.
One word of praise would do much more to “improve” him than a hundred critical words ever could. But it would also change her. Giving thanks produces a habit of thankfulness. Gratitude begets more pernicious gratitude.
Eventually any human comes to resent living with another human who doesn’t seem to notice or care for them in even the most elementary ways. Resentment will escalate simple inattention to positive rudeness.
The humans are all Naamans, certain that their problems are too unique and too knotty for a simple swim in the Jordan.
Here it is very entertaining to take advantage of the human tendency to learn a new obedience one moment and then, in the exact next moment, look angrily around at people who don’t seem as obedient about the same thing.
This sort of girl will always attempt to teach something before she has finished learning it, will always try to hold others to a standard that she herself is going to go slack on in about a month, and will be perfectly unaware of her own hypocrisy.
So choose the one that comes most naturally to her, and let her flesh do the work.
I have had patients escape a five-year steel trap of depression and despair, many feet thick, by the simple discovery that they could confess specific sin, right when it happened, to the Enemy and to the people they sinned against. It’s deceptively simple, and wildly frustrating.
She will be doing these things every day to some degree, and so they are easy for her to overlook. Much potential!
And it means that, next time, both of them are aware that the behavior in question was recently named “sin” and can be regarded as such. Calling sin “sin” is deplorably freeing to both the sinner and the sinned against.
There’s no hypocrite like a religious hypocrite, I always say.
But if she ever gets to realize she could live day in and day out with a clear conscience—woe betide you.
I was on vacation last week, inhabiting the front left wheel of a Walmart shopping cart. Thoroughly enjoyed.
Your patient’s generation of Christians seems to be holding out for something better than just “saying their prayers.” They intend their prayers to be very heartfelt, very well said, and very long. And while they are waiting for such prayers to overtake them, they can often be induced not to pray at all.
In fact we have brought them to a point where any kind of advice must be given in a very self-abusing way, if it is given at all. We have them apologetically admitting to an organized laundry system or meal plan, a clean closet or a sleep-trained infant. Obviously, this is a useful way to weaken human effort in any practical area of life. But we have had our greatest success using it to weaken the spiritual disciplines.
But she is likely to be weak in her knowledge of the Enemy Spirit. She won’t expect present-day interventions on the part of the Enemy.
prayer is the Commander-in-Chief’s personal telephone number, a handwritten invitation to sit in His chamber for a meal and a chat.
Not to mention the smell.
Without another human witness, she won’t know when the prayer stops and the daydreaming begins. If you can keep that clarity from reaching her, you’ll have nothing to fear from her little “prayer” times. They will soon cease. She won’t be able to sustain something that has no beginning or end, and no clear aim.
They’ll never trust a beam that hasn’t held their weight before. And as long as they never test its weight by standing on it, the beam will always remain untrustworthy.
He finds out that she actually has a rather critical opinion of his Lego collection. She finds out that the five jokes he won her heart with are his entire repertoire. Buyer’s remorse, you know. The broken bone that I spoke of earlier.
The thing is, women are wonderful at pinpointing the missing qualities in their menfolk. It really doesn’t matter what kind of man your girl is married to; she will be equipped and ready to discover all the qualities he doesn’t have and to imagine how desirable these qualities must be in a husband.
she’ll wish he would just show his authority now and then—and if he ever shows his authority, Enemy help him!
Her new male friend at the office should prove a useful foil. How different he is from her husband! (Let her count the ways!)
If she had him, he would not be worth having. He is a logical impossibility.
Just remember: when it suits you, encourage her to think that only the mind matters and that she may do what she likes with her body. Then, when it suits, encourage her to think that only the body matters and that she may do what she likes in her mind. By these alternating tacks, you may get her to deliver up both her body and her soul to Our Father Below.
These are the pleasures that take longer to hit the brain but leave a human creature without a belly ache.
We encourage them in their fleshly schizophrenia because we find that the heavenish longings can never be totally killed—and besides, sometimes they help disguise the other pursuits we are helping them to get tangled up in.
You want her never to lay her desires out next to each other and ask about the logic of them. How is it possible to “love” the Enemy but to also resist His presence in her private life and innermost thoughts?
I want to live contentedly as the Enemy’s servant, but I will complain about most of the life He gave me to live. I want children, but I don’t want to give up anything to raise them. I want close friends, but I want relationships to be easy and pain-free. I want to be disciplined, but I don’t want to discipline myself.
Even her highest affections are not so high. She loves, not holiness itself, but the idea of holiness. She loves the idea of becoming more respectable, more knowledgeable, more fruitful, more righteous. It’s a love of progress, of dignity, of potential, of “growth.” She still rarely fixes her thoughts on Him. At her best, she is engrossed with the idea of herself being more engrossed with Him.
Her flesh already enjoys tasting things—this dress, that friend, this song, that hobby, this man, that flattering attention from a group of laughing friends, this audience, that book, this identity, that church.
My dear Hemlock, I spent a refreshing weekend inhabiting a roll of packing tape during my patient’s sister’s move, making sure the end of the roll was completely invisible to the naked human eye.
But it’s very clear to me what the greatest advantage of the internet has been and will continue to be: victory over Time.
Time, as the Enemy created it, is like a road stretching out in front of them. They can only pass over it on the ground, one foot in front of the other. Sometimes their pace feels quick, and sometimes slow, but they can only pass through the moments singly. When they are working hard, or in pain, their pace feels burdensome. They count every inch, every second. When they are on a pleasurable stretch of road, the time practically skips for them. They look up and say something like, “What, ten o’clock already?” And we know, with a cringing feeling of loss, that they have actually experienced
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As one of our great contemporaries has said, the best state for man is to be “fuddled,” doing neither what he ought nor what he likes.
Put a clear picture in her mind of a friendship she’s never had, one that is easy and intimate, with a deep heart connection and a steady stream of fun.
We don’t mind women being physically or emotionally close; they can climb all over each other, for all we care. It’s a certain kind of like-mindedness we abhor, one in which the creatures co-labor with joy, always within the bounds of Enemy teaching, receiving refreshment and insight for the Enemy’s work.
