Day 33
I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
—JOHN 16:33
Today we are revisiting CS Lewis’s classic, The Screwtape Letters which gives us powerful spiritual insight into the strategies of the devil. This book is written from the point of view of a senior demon training a junior demon on the effective ways to tempt a person (the patient) away from God. Since this letter is written from the perspective of a demon, God is referred to as “The Enemy”, and Satan as “Our Father Below.”
In this excerpt, Lewis helps us understand this concept: that times of spiritual richness (peaks) alternating with times of spiritual dryness (troughs) are both part of God’s plan for us. In fact, the times when God seems distant are crucial times of growth for us. Instead of blaming ourselves for our dry times, recognizing the hand of God in them will help us endure and trust Him even when we don’t feel His presence or see any evidence of His work in our lives.
“Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.
But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing... 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... Our war air 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.
And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment, but... merely to override a human will... would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such 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. Do not be deceived... Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
Remember that even in times of trouble, God is still at work within us. Trust Him in the peaks and trust Him in the troughs. When our hearts are submitted to Him, He is at work within us no matter what our circumstances are. Take heart, for God is pleased when we walk on, even when we stumble.
