Wanted secular miracle worker

Secular miracle workers give us the gift of self-satisfaction along with the comfort of believing that, should we actually need such help, it would take a week--at most--to turn us into who we ought to be. Too many people desperately want to believe they can have a dancer's physique in 20 minutes, three times a week, before the month is through, or that they deserve this or that material possession--just because. Of course, possessing that chiseled body or luxury car (without the years of discipline that yielded the outcome) somehow will make them materially, truly different. They have it backwards.

Dolores Puterbaugh is a psychotherapist in private practice in Largo, Fla.

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