I started reading the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis a few days ago. It's a bit difficult to read through and takes more time to digest because everything is switched (e.g. "The Enemy" is God and the main character is a demon). However, I'm glad that it's forcing me to slow down and think about what I read. Too often I just chug through a book and as long as I get the main idea I'm good so this reading and thinking combination is working out well. Anyways, there's a section in Chapter 8 that I just kept reading over and over again. Now remember, this is in the form of a letter written by a demon named, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood.
"To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk abotu His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself -- creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in; He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.....
It is during the trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best... He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles (p. 38-39, 40)"
C.S. Lewis is just brilliant. He words things so well! I think his ability to write from the perspective of a demon to his little minion demon gives me such great insight into our weaknesses as humans. I tend to see dry spouts in my faith as the worst times when God feels so distant, as though his distance is a bad thing. Just like those last few lines say, "He wants us to learn to walk (by faith) and must therefore take away His hand." It's like a parent watching their child learn how to walk. The child will never learn if the parent never lets go.... It's in the troughs or the valleys that God lets us "test our legs" in a sense and practice living and walking by faith. His letting go for a bit forces us to test our faith and walk because He wants us to learn. Even if we stumble, He is pleased! Stumbling means we are trying! It means we are attempting to move forward and grow and make progress to becoming more like Him! I may feel like a failure when I stumble, but He is pleased, and He is even more pleased when I cry out to him in the trough, in the dry valley. How encouraging that "the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best"!
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