"He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs"

"Our choices show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities," so said Professor Dumbledore to Harry Potter.

It is our agency, given to us by God, that proves to Him, and to ourselves, who we really are. More often than not, we learn through experience, and, as Randy Pausch said,

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." 

That really the beauty of life. We learn through experience, and more especially through hard things. "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me," so says Paul.

In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape is writing to his nephew, Wormwood, about us, about how humans go through troughs and peaks, and how we react to that. The interesting thing is Screwtape's understanding (but not really) of how God teaches us and makes us who we are.

 To decide what the best use of it (the troughs) is, you must ask what use 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 about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. 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.

   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 you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. 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.

(Letter No. 8, The Screwtape Letters) 

I love this insight into the nature of God, that He teaches us through trials, He loves us. He wants us to learn by ourselves, because at the end of the day, that is how we grow and come into our own. We grow through trials because we learn, at the the end of the day, that we can and must always rely on God. He is the only way to true joy! When we give our wills to Him, our lives are then built on true principles that will bring eternal happiness. 


I've thought a lot about what my life would be without the Gospel, that perhaps I could still be happy. But, I don't believe that I would know that it is in a family that I can be truly happy. Keeping that eternal perspective allows me to know that when push comes to shove, God will always be there for me, even when He can't be, because He needs me to grow into the man He wants me to be.