How to tell if you're in a relationship

Dear Hannah,

I've got something to confess.

The other day I was invited, by a man who personally ruined my old Bible study group, to have a discussion about the Holy Spirit.  I'll admit up front that I lied to get out of it.  I shouldn't have lied, but I lied boldly.  I couldn't think of anything else to say.  What do you tell a man when he gives you the option to meet at any time and you can't tell him he sucks?  You don't want to be cruel -- you don't want to tell him that he drives you nuts.  The most agreeable option at that point was to to say that I hadn't been interested in religious discussions for some time now, which is a lie -- because I'm very interested in having religious discussions.  I'll have religious people over for dinner and talk religion with them for hours.  I think he was one of the three people I know who I wouldn't have the discussion with even when I was religious, which meant my apostasy for once was actually useful.  But he tried, God bless him; and when I shot him down he used a tactic that's always disturbed me, which was to tell me that he didn't want to have a religious conversation either.  He said Jesus didn't want us to have religious conversations.  I immediately knew what's coming next.  They say because Christianity isn't a religion, and then they always find a way to add because Christianity is a relationship. 

Why papa is vain

Dear Hannah,

One of the great difficulties of publishing my thoughts has been that some people have called me arrogant.  I actually had two people say I was full of myself within the same week -- for which I consider it a horrible week.  It's always good to hear someone call you out on your faults, especially when there might be an inkling of truth to it.  It's better than going your whole life being an ass and everyone thinking it except yourself.  Sometimes we learn more from our enemies than our friends.  Sometimes they'll tell us things our friends won't, because an enemy's happiness doesn't usually rely on ours.  Even if an insult is unfair, sometimes it allows us some good reflection, which may result in our improvement.  I advise most everyone to listen to their enemies.  They may do you more good than you realize.

A toast to Bill Clinton

Dear Hannah,

I know it sounds strange to say -- and maybe we should keep this a secret from your grandpa -- but one of the presidents I'm happy to think about is Bill Clinton.  To be completely honest, I don't know much about anything he did as president, because I was too young to understand much of it.  What does make me happy is that he proves to me, on some level, that mankind has evolved significantly in our ideas about women.

God's orphan

Dear Hannah,

In the world of compliments, I've found you can screw things up in one of two ways.  The first is by giving a compliment that's not good enough; and the second is to give a compliment that's so good it embarrasses whoever gets it.