My Dear Hemlock

by Tilly Dillehay

Right seeing is for right living, not for morbid microscopic wallowing in sin. You read these pages with the ready forgiveness of the Father at your side.

But the way they respond to this disappointment is like the setting of a bone after a fracture.

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.

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.

Give her just enough awareness to try to “do better,” to climb out of the situation by forcing herself into a calmer mood, changing the scene, or getting on her phone for distraction. Put a little distance between her and the moment, and you can guide her smoothly into the next temptation, burdened and unarmed.

The Book makes believers; prayer seems to make radicals. It produces people who don’t just claim but actually appear to believe that they are in a war.

Her legs will, indeed, atrophy. The strength it takes to travel through time will simply leave her. In the end, she’ll be sitting at a table with friends, and the burden of having her legs touch the road of time will be too much, even at such an easy and pleasant part of the road! She’ll pull her phone out of her pocket, and it’s not even WORK she’s avoiding; it’s pleasure.

If she laughs with these people long enough, she will come to imply agreement with them even when she doesn’t agree. Implied agreement will soon shift to true agreement. And all of this change can be accomplished smoothly, as smooth as wine gliding through lips and teeth.

Laughter is a Trojan horse into the human heart. In it, you may hide any soldier you choose, so long as you find the flavor of humor that suits a particular patient.

The most entertaining thing in the world is watching a man make up a theological reason for leaving a church that his wife has long ago determined to leave because of hurt feelings. When a family leaves a church, eight times out of ten, they leave for reasons other than the ones stated. Throw a bone into the middle of their women, and you will sap strength from their men.

The grateful woman is grateful around and between and throughout every hard season. In the end, a hard season only serves to strengthen her faith and gratitude. She is in the habit of responding a certain way, and the habit doesn’t simply disappear because her blasted husband lost his blasted job.

This program, usually utilized with the female, is just a fresh on-ramp to the idea that the individual has the right to define reality. We typically find it is quite easy to help women make the jump from “emotions are real” to “emotions are the most real.”

In the course of teaching her to frontload the emotional state of others, you may also get her to do the same with her own emotions. Then she will become the one demanding that others make allowances for and bow down to her passions.

They saw her meet the stages of death with strange, quiet smiles. They saw her secret, in the end: she actually believed what she was saying all this long while.