The Screwtape Letters---Installment Two.

Ok, he’s back. I wish C.S. Lewis was still alive, and then I wish that I knew him, of course.

I wonder if he was talkative. That’s probably doubtful.  He seems to be too much of a thinker and too much of a writer.

But then again, I write all the time and am quite talkative.

 Whatever.

 Have you peoples been reading The Screwtape Letters? I apologize that this is only my second installment. But, alas…

 The setting scene is that the “patient” has just become a Christian. For those of us who are Christians we can honestly say from experience, “So now, let the harassment REALLY begin.”

What is so fascinating about this book is seeing that the devil’s “big guns” are usually really small things in our daily life. Or what we think of as small things. But has anyone else realized that life is lived in the everyday and the majority of our life IS the small things?

Naturally, then, that is the area to trip up a believer.

 In the opening paragraph the phrase, “All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor.”

Have you given thought to that?

What are your habits? Your routines?

 I had a hard time thinking of things I would classify as habits. And then an even harder time deciding whether those were “redeemed” habits or just carryover things from before I was a Christian. Is there room for growth in the areas we don’t even have to think about anymore?

Give thought to it. What are your habits?

I love how Screwtape shows our folly by showing us our thoughts about the other people in our “church.” We can get disappointed or snobbish or critical or whatever about the other people who fill our pews. But what a brilliant statement he makes (and I think this can and SHOULD be asked of ourselves about every kind of our disappointments): “Never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind…”

I can easily fall into this, getting all my hopes up about all areas of life, only then to be dashed. But really when I think about it, yes, my hopes were up, but would I have been able to write down that which I expected out of the situation? Or was it all just hypothetical guesses of what feelings I thought the situation would incur? And if I was able to write a list of what I expected, how many of those things were actually realistic?

Maybe this isn’t big for you, but it really has changed my attitude about a lot of things. I find myself now saying, “It was different than expected. Not that I would have been able to tell you what I expected…” I think it is an admittance that disappointment is most commonly a feeling that is based on nothing.

 “Keep everything hazy in his mind,” Screwtape says.

What a good method.

Oh goodness.

Lord, give us clarity of mind to be honest about our expectations, and then the trust in you to let those go.

And speaking of disappointments, I will admit that I am the kind of person who wants to be good at something right away. I don’t have time to waste, I say to myself, in becoming great at this or that, I need to be great NOW.

But that’s not really how life works, is it?

Screwtape says that “The Enemy (Jesus) allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor.” It’s when the rubber meets the road and we realize that all of our dreams or aspirations will be accomplished with bleary eyes and sweat on our brow.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT THINGS FALLING INTO PLACE!??!?” we scream, never wanting to think that blood, sweat, and tears is how most things fall into place. Good fortune, I have a tendency to believe, should just be handed to me. It should want me to be its owner and therefore search me out.

If only.

I think knowing this makes me feel the same way I did when I realized what being an “adult” was all about. I remember coming home from work in the evenings and saying to myself, “Nobody told me when I was a kid that this is what being an adult meant!” Where was all of that time to do what I loved?! Why in the world am I working to make money if I don’t have any time to do stuff with that money? When do I get to live?! All of those thoughts stormed my brain day in and day out.

Well this is kind of similar: Nobody told me that it would actually take WORK, not just dreams and plans and blueprints. Nothing gets done unless I DO IT.

What a harsh reality.

He says we feel it when we have to take “dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.” We feel it when we decide to learn a language….or when we get married and have to learn to LIVE with the person.

BUT…there is hope. We will get less and less dogged about it if we push through. “If once they get through the initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.”
Isn’t that great to know? That on the OTHER side of the doing comes less temptation to the disappointment? Because on that OTHER side, we know what it takes, and we have the pain in our back to prove it.

He closes the chapter by saying that disappointments will be greatly easier to inflict upon the patient if there is rational grounds for disappointments. But this is ONLY the case if, again, all things are still hazy in his mind. Particularly if those hazy things are facts about HIMSELF. The patient (Believers) can be rationally disappointed if, and only if, he has a heightened view of HIMSELF. If we somehow believe that we cannot be the one disappointing, then we will continue to exist in our prideful and continually wounded-by-others state.

I know, I know. Admitting that you could be the one causing disappointment in someone else is entirely too uncomfortable to dwell on. It’s entirely too selfless of us to entertain that thought.

But let’s be honest, where we are disappointed in someone else, there is a good chance they are disappointed in us.

These things are two-way streets.