"Of course, I got frustrated. And it really got me thinking that, perhaps formula books, by that I mean books that take you through a series of steps, may not be all that compatible with the Bible, I looked on the shelf at all the self help books I happened to own, the ones about losing weight, the ones about making girls like you, the ones about getting rich and, the ones about starting your own pirate radio station, and I realized none of them actually helped me all that much. All the promises of fulfillment really didn't work. My life was fairly normal before I had read them, meaning I had good days and bad days, and then my life was fairly normal after I read them too, meaning I still had good days and bad days. It made me wonder, honestly, if such a complex existence as the one you and I are living can really be broken down into a few steps. It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was" (11).
"I realize, of course, that this is very silly and there is no such thing as a genie that lives in a lamp, but it makes me wonder if secretly we don't wish God were a genie who could deliver a few wishes here and there. And that makes me wonder if what we really want from the formulas are the wishes, not God. It makes me wonder if what we want is control, not a relationship" (12).
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