Looking Back:
Six of us from the AlphaCitiCorps ministry recently returned from a wonderful five-day adventure in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It was our fourth trip in the last six years. While we were sitting around a roaring fire at our campsite on beautiful Seagull Lake, I was reminded of an earlier lesson learned on a previous trip with my nephew into the Quetico.
It was early May and we had endured an overnight blizzard on a small island in the middle of Lake Louisa. We broke camp in the biting cold, loaded the canoe, and headed into the teeth of a strong north wind. Paddling from the back seat of the light-weight Wenonah, it took all my strength to keep us on course. We paddled for what seemed like an hour, and it didnʼt seem like we had made any progress at all. 
I decided to turn around to see if we had put any space at all between our current location and the campsite we had left behind. In turning, I could barely make out the campsite in the distance. I was shocked to see how far weʼd come. As I turned back to resume paddling, a gentle thought appeared in my mind, “Sometimes you have to look back to see how far youʼve come.”
Thatʼs especially important advice for us men of AlphaCitiCorps. We get impatient with ourselves because we donʼt seem to move forward as quickly as weʼd like. Those words have been a source of great encouragement for me since that experience. During a recent ʻseasonʼ of personal darkness, I began beating myself up because I wasnʼt what I would be, or could be, or maybe even should be. As I sat late one night meditating on my condition, I began praying words that seemed to be formed somewhere other than my mind. “Thank you, Father, for being so patient with me,” I prayed. I repeated those words over and over before realizing that I was being given a revelation of my heavenly fatherʼs great unconditional love for me. “God is love. Love is patient,” I thought. He doesnʼt love me because of where Iʼm at, he loves me
because of who he is. And thereʼs nothing I can do about that.
The depth of our revelation of the fatherʼs love is the greatest motivation to our moving forward into becoming the person he created us to be. His love is not reactive – he doesnʼt see something in us thatʼs lovable and then decide to love us. His love is creative. “We love becausehe first loved us” (1 John 4:19). If you are troubled about where youʼre at, ask God to give you a revelation of his great love for you. Youʼll be surprised when you look back. Youʼll have come much further than you think.“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” (John 15:9)
The Father wants to gain complete possession of our souls. To do this He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. He really does love us, and His service is to be in perfect freedom. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of 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. He wants servants who can finally become sons. His nature is to give. He is full and flows over into those of us whose wills are committed to Him. He wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in. That is why He does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to us in any degree He chooses and at any moment. The Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride our 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. We are to be one with Him, but yet ourselves; merely to cancel us, or assimilate us, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little over-riding at the beginning. He will set us off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to us, 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 our conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves us to stand up on our 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 we are growing into the sort of creature He wants us to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. Our Father wants us 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 our stumbles.
We do the greatest harm to the enemy when we, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Father’s will, look round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and ask why we have been forsaken, and still obey.
(based on Screwtape Letters, Letter 8, by C. S. Lewis – adapted by Kent R. Garborg)
