Mr. Rogers: Suppose you are deeply in debt - $220,000! You are about to be wiped out financially. A man offers to pay your debt. You say, “Thank you”! The man writes a check for $220,000 to the bank. Who paid the debt? Another man is also $220,000 in debt. The same man who paid your debt offers to pay his. But this man shouts, “How dare you! I can stand on my own two feet!” The bank repossess the man’s house & all his other property. Was HIS debt paid? If not, why not?
I don't think your analogy follows at all from what I think Esquirette was saying. In applying it to your analogy I inferred that Esquirette meant that there would BE no man who would offer to pay your debt of $220,000. Instead, there would be a man who saw that you were in debt and then decide by himself that he was going to pay it. And he would not tell you at first. (For his own reasons the man decided that he would do the same for many others in debt, but not everyone. And in fact, he decided to make one big payment, say billions of dollars, covering everyone he chose, instead of many smaller payments.)
In any event, after he decided that he would be paying your debt then he came to you and began communicating with you. He showed you many things you had never known before, and after a while you were convinced that you needed to follow this man. He showed you that you would never be able to pay off your debt unless you followed him and let him pay it for you. You believed in him and wanted to do as he said. (You see, this man had a way of communicating that never failed.) Now, it was at this point, when you decided to follow this man, that he called the bank and instructed it to apply $220,000 from the billions he had already paid directly to your account, thus wiping out your debt.
Naturally you were grateful, but notice that this did not pan out as a bargaining situation between two parties at arm's length. The man decided by himself that he was going to pay, he knew he would convince you to follow, and then he made it happen. Sure, you listened, and agreed to follow. You made a choice. That was your experience. What you didn't know at the time was how much planning and effort the man had already put in so that you would wind up for certain in the wonderful place you landed. Everything really WAS all his doing.
Well, only Esquirette can say for sure what she meant. This is just how I took it. :)
Thanks for the heads up.
If I went around to my friends and the bank and said I had paid part of the debt, or that this benefactor was now bowing to my bidding because I had let him do me this great service, that would be insulting to him who paid it all.