Grimrack Quotes

I've seen a disobedient client simply turn his attention toward The Adversary and ask "Are You still there?" and suddenly all was made well between them. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins. ~ Geoffrey Wood

We have deficited upon their attention in the most disorderly fashion. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it's just better form. ~ Geoffrey Wood

When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy. ~ Geoffrey Wood

But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you'll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There's more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would've worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would've then better lead them on to happiness. ~ Geoffrey Wood

I shouldn't need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn't think to stop it? ~ Geoffrey Wood

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they're always either standing next to a hole or down in it. ~ Geoffrey Wood

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we've already got them in Hell. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don't feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they're stuck right where they started: Guilty. ~ Geoffrey Wood

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased. ~ Geoffrey Wood

The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Remember, this type doesn't really believe He'll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay. ~ Geoffrey Wood

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves. ~ Geoffrey Wood

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary's greatest curatives - gratitude. ~ Geoffrey Wood

They view repentance as the thing they have to do in order to earn forgiveness, therefore the more difficult they make it, the more credit they tally up. ~ Geoffrey Wood

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn't mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude. ~ Geoffrey Wood

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain. ~ Geoffrey Wood

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone. ~ Geoffrey Wood

With addiction, a client's fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana - the fear of Fear itself. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Chant to him: "An individual thinks for himself." Then roll that around in his head till it means: "If I didn't think of it, it has no bearing on my life. ~ Geoffrey Wood

So in a man's mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don't trust things you can manage, you manage them. And so, God as information is managed and no relationship of trust is fostered. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed. ~ Geoffrey Wood

For example, your man might think: I don't steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased - facts the new trues. ~ Geoffrey Wood

True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about "knowing God," they mean more than, "I understand what you're saying about God," but also, "It fits my experience of Him. ~ Geoffrey Wood

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. ~ Geoffrey Wood

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. ~ Geoffrey Wood

The eye is to light as the soul is to God. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation. ~ Geoffrey Wood

In Joy, to lose one's life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Make them imagine repentance more like an appearance in court before a cranky old judge, less like a child knocking on his father's study door to have a chat. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten. ~ Geoffrey Wood

In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they'd prefer. ~ Geoffrey Wood

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag. ~ Geoffrey Wood

They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself. ~ Geoffrey Wood

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook - that prissy little virtue, Temperance - for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended. ~ Geoffrey Wood

No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves. ~ Geoffrey Wood

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

Consumerism, the new black. I want my burger my way. Shaken not stirred. Sauce on the side and rare but not rare rare. Venti, two-pump, sugar-free vanilla, non-fat, two Splenda, extra-hot, extra-whip, extra-mocha Mocha and can you put the Splenda in before you pour the milk? (See, this is where it gets positively delicious!) Under the auspices of that wonderful word Consumerism, not only is this not seen as overly demanding, it's positively encouraged by everyone. ~ Geoffrey Wood

At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason to think any statement made by some part concerning the whole has any validity. Mind was caused by the material universe, if mind is right. But only the greater can accurately define the lesser, never the other way round, so if mind is right, mind would never know. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Faith is where they learn about their God; but Prayer is where they explore Him. ~ Geoffrey Wood

If we blind them to The Adversary - decrease their desire for The Desire - while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing "freedom of choice," then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact. ~ Geoffrey Wood

They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief. ~ Geoffrey Wood

And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration - there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Once a man discovers that his obedience is primarily for others' sake, that every miracle that ever amazed happened because of someone's obedience somewhere, that properly understood, his obedience prepares the way for His visitation, well, then we run up against the appalling result of attentive servants gladly going about His bidding without the slightest hesitation. Indeed, in the worse cases, they run where He says run with reckless abandon. ~ Geoffrey Wood

That dusty hill we can scarcely look upon and then only with pain, The Adversary, also with pain, does and must ever witness The Crucifixion. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it - His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe. ~ Geoffrey Wood

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: "What-Would-Jesus-Buy" - well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Teach them the shame that tells the lie, "I am unforgivable," when the truth is, "I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control." Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage. ~ Geoffrey Wood

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates. ~ Geoffrey Wood

They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they're quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But you'll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word "pursuit". To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don't do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There's too much wrong in there to even scratch at that! ~ Geoffrey Wood