It’s happened again...someone trying to ram something down my neck, as if I am lesser somehow. I would not dream of inflicting another with my radical ideas, if indeed I had any.

What is it about me that enables and encourages these people to thrust their ideas onto me? Do they do it to everyone...or just me? I can stand it for a short while, being gracious, trying to see their point of view. But not to argue and debate fruitlessly, trying to make them see from another angle. I do not wish to change them. But they wish to change me.

‘You are so good for me,’ they say, ‘you make me think.’ But I do not wish to use my precious energy being ‘good for them’. How nice if someone were ‘good for me!’

It happened with the Christians. She thought I was fertile ground on which to inflict her ‘good’ ideas. ‘We should all give our hearts to God,’ she nagged. She insisted that I should give my heart to God. She was good at it. Had all the spiel. I listened. She convinced me I was deficient. Perhaps I should do as she says. I was troubled in my marriage, discontented. So I gave my heart to God. In the kitchen one day.

Amazing! I felt strong, decisive, not alone...and I left my husband! I am sure, in retrospect, it was not what God wanted, or what was best. Not at all. I was silly, easily led, gullible. It was my blind obedience to another’s will that led me to believe that in so doing I could obey my own weak desires and whims. Without reasoning the situation, without realising the consequences of my actions. How sad to be so whitewashed mentally, that I felt God was ‘on my side.’

How awful for my present agitator that he cannot see this in himself, that he is not supreme in his thoughts; that he is as fallible as everyone else; that he should, at least, be not blind to another point of view. He becomes his own cult. Spare me from these people.