When I first became a Christian, life was magical. I woke up listening to Christian radio. My prayer time in the morning was as real and pleasant as sunshine in my room. There was an instance in my early conversion where I actually witnessed color differently. It was like I was seeing brighter. More beautiful colors. I wasn’t high. But I was on something.
I drank in sermons from everywhere because I was so thirsty. Enrolled in Bible college. Fought with my dad on how I needed to stay at bible college, instead of staying with my university education. I had extreme devotion to Jesus.
At this point I probably didn’t read this passage in Hebrews 12
7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? [...] 10 Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. 11 No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Hebrews 12:7, 10-11 (NIV)
I’m pretty sure I didn’t read this at the time, or if I did I would not have understood the gravity of what it talks about. Because I’m sure at the time a prayer that would have gone up would be. YEAH GOD DISCIPLINE ME. And it would have been a genuine prayer. And God may and did grant it. But it sounds a little S&Mee
These early experiences of color, teaching, devotion, and crazy prayers, moved me down a path where I decided to follow Jesus. And three years later I found myself talking to a friend on the side of the road crying. I was explaining to him how all of these magical experiences had dried up. If I was still seeing colors differently, I didn’t remember how I used to see them. I was knee deep in my studies, but none of it was feeding my soul. And I told this person that I simply felt that God wasn’t near me any more.
As people who inhabit time, we live our life in undulation. This means that while our spirit can be directed toward an eternal object, our bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. As a result our nearest approach to constancy, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which we repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
When I was crying on the side of the road, I just thought I did something wrong. Maybe I wasn’t praying hard enough or I wasn’t worshiping long enough. Little did I know that this removal from God’s presence, from his magical world. Was God’s very point. It was him giving me freedom. This Trough, this discipline of living life without “EXTREME COLOR” was letting me freely become his son. Many times when we experience hardship, all we can see is the pain.
But sometimes we have to see things from another perspective. CS LEWIS had a gift for articulating God from other perspectives. This is a snippet from a letter written by Uncle Screwtape in the “screwtape letters,” his perspective is one of an undersecretary to the devil, and he is writing to his nephew Wormwood, who just graduated and has his first project. A Human host. We don’t have much context, but in this scenario Wormwood Is trying to teach why as a devil, they need to not coast during the troughs of someone’s life
The Enemy [GOD] allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and servants—"sons" is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.
…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.
Have you ever seen the bookmark or fine piece of Christian artwork entitled Footprints? Its about a guy dying, seeing his life as a beach. He was walking with Jesus and both of them were making footprints in the sand. When he looked back during the hard times of his life he noticed that there was only one set of footprints. When he inquired to Jesus why he left him during those times, Jesus replied. I didn’t leave you alone… I was carrying you.
I think it is funny that according to Screwtape, it is God’s plan to allow us to walk on our own. It is the way we can freely become his “child” without God’s intervention. To live faithfully through the difficulty of life.
We live our life in undulation our hardship can easily be seen as that… hardship. but if we look at it in light of eternity, these troughs of hardship in which God seems absent, our cries, our prayers, our confusion is far from non-devotion. because it is these cries and stances that allow us to freely stand on our 2 feet. Housing the character of God within us. This stance without the support of our senses seeing God in Dazzling Color, is what God calls true devotion.
