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)