Tilly Dillehay > Quotes

“Is she naturally independent? Encourage her to keep distance between herself and other women, to never need them more than they need her. Strengthen her impulse to guard herself from the discomfort of anyone “meddling” in her heart’s affairs. This will eliminate the worst kind of friend (and, of course, the Enemy Himself, who is the most meddlesome of all).”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“prayer is the Commander-in-Chief’s personal telephone number, a handwritten invitation to sit in His chamber for a meal and a chat.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“And so, in this tidy little stalemate, your new Christian patient won’t often come across an older woman who’s offering to teach her to pray—if indeed the older Christians around her even know how.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“I spent a refreshing weekend inhabiting a roll of packing tape during my patient’s sister’s move, making sure the end of the roll was completely invisible to the naked human eye.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“The body is nothing to spend your life on. “You are what you eat” may be true on a very cold, chemical level, but it is not true on any other. Food is not the material that you’ll be bringing with you into the next place. Like the foolish man who tore barns down to build bigger ones, all the food you ever worshiped and served will one day be an abandoned tower. Every organ you’ve ever given careful and sustained attention to will one day stop working.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“I want to live contentedly as the Enemy’s servant, but I will complain about most of the life He gave me to live. I want children, but I don’t want to give up anything to raise them. I want close friends, but I want relationships to be easy and pain-free. I want to be disciplined, but I don’t want to discipline myself.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“We want her to feel that the role of her friends is to validate her existence: “I have friends, therefore I am.” Or even more fun: “I have no friends, therefore I am not.” This is the thought we thrust upon her whenever someone declines her invitation to dinner, whenever she catches a glimpse of two other women in deep conversation. It sounds like a stretch, but believe me, it isn’t to these overgrown kindergartners. They learned their habits of female interaction in that early age of friendship bracelets and You can’t sit here.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“We’re not machines, and food has more purposes than to fuel our mechanical bodies. When we turn our kitchens into labs and attempt to live as machines without tastes, we’ll find ourselves going against the grain of the way we were made, as well as thumbing our nose at the substances God made in such varied abundance.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“Jesus ushered in a new era for Israelite ceremonial law, fulfilling and updating it to reflect the inauguration of his kingdom. Among his many clarifying, life-giving statements, Jesus made this statement about food and sin: Nothing can defile you by going into your mouth. Sin, from inside the heart, is what defiles you.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“I mean that when I'm having a bad food day, the problem seems to be not too close an association with my food, but that I'm disconnected completely from it. What I don't seem to do on a bad food day is cook, or even sit down at a table and eat. I'm in the car, or on the couch, or standing up in front of ther pantry or something. There's no thanksgiving; there's little pleasure. For me to cook a meal means that I have to spend time on it, think about someone besides myself, and then sit down, give thanks, and treat food like food.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“Thus you have a sea of adults on the internet, earnestly defending a system that has left generations of children alone in a terrifying, limitless, formless reality. We will soon have a world run by foundlings, orphaned by the abdication of authority.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“don’t want to think that there is such a thing as a sheep and a goat (Matthew 25:31-36). I don’t want to think that there is such a thing as a wheat plant and a weed (Matthew 13:24-30). I really hate to think that there are virgins who remember their oil and virgins who forget their oil (Matthew 25:1-13), and I hate that somebody is not going into the wedding feast because they didn’t dress themselves properly (Matthew 22:1-14).”
― Tilly Dillehay, Seeing Green: Don't Let Envy Color Your Joy

“These are the ultimate conflicting desires that, if you do your job well, she must never examine and compare. You want her never to lay her desires out next to each other and ask about the logic of them. How is it possible to “love” the Enemy but to also resist His presence in her private life and innermost thoughts? To long for the “joy” of having no secrets but to keep drinking on the sly or looking at pornography in secret? To make a run for the Enemy’s “freedom” but to continually look back at the city she escaped from?”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“The table fellowship of the church is at stake here in these small things. Our witness outside the church is at stake. Whether we are guests or hosts, we should be known as gracious people who are quick to bend in deference to others. One of the most pleasurable and effective tools we have for connecting with believers and unbelievers—fellowship over food—is endangered when we allow ourselves to become fussy eaters. We can’t focus on the ministry that takes place around the table—ministry to individuals with needs that extend far beyond fear of sugar—when we’re intent on flourishing the word Paleo to anyone who will listen. Food snobbery isn’t just a silly social gaffe. It’s an indulgence of the flesh that may have far-reaching consequences to the spiritual lives of ourselves and others.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“For one thing, it acknowledges that the behavior in question has been officially flagged “sin.” Nobody can hide behind “But it was only . . .” And it means that, next time, both of them are aware that the behavior in question was recently named “sin” and can be regarded as such. Calling sin “sin” is deplorably freeing to both the sinner and the sinned against.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“Once you understand the value of something good, it changes the way you consume that thing.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“#1 sins go unconfessed because they feel too great, #2 sins go unconfessed because they feel too small. You can get her to think, “I do this every day. You can’t go through a big conversation every time, can you?” You see? This way, you get her to pile up months of crusted-over “small” sins. She and her husband will go picking their way around the piles, stepping on old trash left from a silent supper three months ago, and they’ll stop noticing it’s even there. As long as they never begin the habit of confession, they’ll build this delightful tartar of the soul for years. This is how hatred begins, Hemlock. Don’t underestimate it.”
― Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock

“1. You are responsible for what you know, but you can’t know everything. In general, our tendency today is to take too much responsibility for things that are outside our control (i.e., the precise sourcing of every product that enters our homes), and too little responsibility for things that we’re very much responsible for (i.e., our hearts, our tongues, etc.). So, if you release some of that low-grade guilt you might carry over all the stuff you should be doing that you can’t do, the stuff you should be reading about that you can’t read about, it may free you up to take responsibility for what you know (i.e., your duty to love and serve your neighbor and do it joyfully).”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger

“Jealousy is a feeling of discomfort and anger that something you have is being threatened. This means that jealousy can sometimes be righteous. God himself is a jealous God (Exodus 20:5-6; Deuteronomy 6:15). Envy, in contrast, is distress over something that someone else possesses. It is always sinful, and it is not a feeling ever attributed to God.11 Covetousness is the desire for what someone else possesses. It would be satisfied simply to have what the other person has. Envy, in contrast, takes it personally that the other person has what he has, and would be satisfied to see the possession or quality destroyed rather than see the other person enjoying it.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Seeing Green: Don't Let Envy Color Your Joy

“Maybe we don’t know much about food. Maybe we do. Maybe we are a cheerful follower of the newest final word on nutrition, or maybe we are cheerfully feeding our children out of the frozen meal section at Save-A-Lot. But whatever we eat, we are largely dependent on other people for our ingredients and our information. We may feel that we’re taking charge of our destinies by following a low-inflammation diet, but we are getting our ideas from fallible people. We may feel like we’re cultivated and discriminating consumers who only go for the best, but we are probably just choosing items that have been chosen for us—that the great machine of food industry picked out via consumer trials 15 months ago. And there’s no problem with this. It’s just that we shouldn’t forget it.”
― Tilly Dillehay, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger