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.

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

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.

Everyone needs to calm down! Okay, you got a weird cookie. So what? I don’t mean to swat your ego here, buddy, but this smacks a little narcissistic for me. God is not trying to communicate to you through a cookie. It doesn’t work that way. God’s not all Jack-and-the-magic-beans and tooth-beneath-the pillow voodoo. You don’t just close your eyes, flap open your Bible, and slam a steak knife into a verse. It’s that sort of thinking that leads to witch trials and Senate probes.

They prefer a God of an altogether softer flavor. Nothing too extreme. Complaisance, not magnanimity. They do not think upon the “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.” They prefer to think in terms of “God liking them.” That’s the God they’ve conjured for themselves.

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.