the why

I've been thinking a lot about love and obedience and motivation lately. My dad got upset with me a couple of weeks back because I still hadn't transferred my APUS credit from PCC. I should have done that over a year ago, but it kept getting shoved on the back burner because I had so many other things to do that seemed to take higher priority. He said that he didn't ask much from me, and he wished that I would do this one thing; he said to use it for a birthday present.

Around the same time as the conversation with my dad, I ran into this passage from C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters:


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 good; 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 over-ride 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. 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. 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. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, 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. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but 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.


Think of that! "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...Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but 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." Obedience isn't simply doing what we are told. There is a conscious choice to be obedient, a specific intention. What is our motivation to obey? C. S. Lewis suggests it is our knowledge of God's Love for us, and, in turn, our love for Him. It is the most hopeful Catch-22 we will ever be in: We want to become like God, but in order to do that we must learn for ourselves. In order to learn we have to grow, have trials and experiences that will teach us what we need, and in order for trials He "must therefore take away His hand" for a period of time. But we don't want that; we want Him with us always. And that desire for Him, that love which we have that connects us to a Father we cannot see, is our motivation for obedience. Our continual obedience will increase our love for Him, reinforcing our motivation and desire for progression. It is a beautiful cycle.

Realizing this, the extreme guilt I felt for not completing the transfer of my PCC credit was more understandable. To a lesser degree, my relationship with my earthly father is much like the relationship we have with our Heavenly Father: I know he loves me and I love him back, and that love is more motivation than anything to do what he asks of me. Hopefully, the love I have for both of my Fathers spills into all aspects of my life. I want to succeed in all my endeavors because They expect my best from me. As such, the idea of sacrificing our will to the Father becomes a blessing, not a limitation. Our sacrifice perpetuates the same cycle of love and obedience, creating a stronger bond between us and the Father, which in turn brings us closer to Him. And that is what we want more than anything in this life: to become like God.