Learning to Walk in the Dark

I don't remember the exact moment I checked out The Screwtapes Letters by C.S. Lewis from the BYU library, but I do remember why I checked it out. I was lost. I had reached a crossroads in my life, and I wasn't sure which direction I should go. Things that I had taken for granted, ideas that I had assumed were unchangeable, had all come crashing down around me and I was left staring at the rubble, trying to remember how to build it back up again. I guess finding this book was God's way of giving me the first few pages of the instruction manual.

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. 

While piles of homework stood neglected on my desk, I laid on my bed in my cramped apartment and held this book above my face, turning the pages as fast as I could read. I wanted to understand this moral game that everyone told me I was a part of. I wanted to understand why I continued to progress and then digress, despite clear "communications of His presence," which seemed "great" and provided "easy conquest over temptation" but always seemed to fade eventually and I would once again be left feeling alone, shouting angry words, and thinking that my existence was insignificant, left with only the whispering memory of what I had once felt.

But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. 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. 

But, ironic as it was, these letters written from one devil to another were helping me to understand the divine nature of God more personally than any other piece of literature I had read up to that point. It made Him real. It made everything real. It put life in a sort of perspective I hadn't considered before, a perspective I would have been less willing to accept had my paradigm cathedrals still stood fully intact. Thankfully, they were broken, and because they were broken they could be molded. I found the strength to take tiny steps into the darkness, "to stand up on [my] own legs," to believe that something was one way when everything seemed to be screaming at me that it was another. 

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. 

I began to gain a deeper understanding of "trough periods." I began to understand their necessity and benefits, their power and the lessons they held within their sometimes torturous depths. I began to understand that God is sometimes silent, that he doesn't always blow his trumpet, forcing us to acknowledge Him and His power, because He doesn't want children who are forced to come to his lap. He wants children who choose Him. Willingly.

We can drag our patients along by continual temptations, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot 'tempt' to virtue as we do to vice. 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. 

Agency. That was what it all came down to. The more I came to understand that temptations are designed "only for the table," only for the limited and fleeting pleasure that comes from indulging appetite, the more I understood how profoundly God loved me. I realized He wants me to "learn to walk" because it is what I need. Even though it may require all of his self-control to keep His hand at bay, to let me fall on my face and cry, to get up only to stumble again—He does it. And "He is pleased even with [my] stumbles."

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. 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. 

It was a simple and profound concept that struck me to my core. He is pleased even with my stumbles.The thought echoed in my mind and stayed there. It is there every time I come crashing down to my knees in prayer, weighed down with my own weaknesses. It is there to remind me whenever I am disappointed by others and find myself cursing their stumbles. It is there when I am tired and sad, searching for some sort of explanation or fragment of hope. It is there and it gives me hope. And I get up to try again.