Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.

They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can’t look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf. And loop after loop, the depressed haunt and harrow themselves, sometimes for years, when they have only, for a brief moment, to look away from themselves, to look up.

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn’t see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man’s whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony.

I say “illusion” of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.

God didn’t give Moses ten fortune cookies in a to-go box. God didn’t lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a neon all-you-can-eat sign. And God doesn’t speak to people in bathrooms, public or otherwise.