On my way out the door the other day, leash in hand, I had one of those moments when a thought floats into your mind completely out of the blue and leaves you befuddled. I could almost feel it fluttering around my head a few seconds before it came to rest in my mind. The thought was this, "Sometimes God reveals His faithfulness and sometimes He asks us to remember it." So I've been chewing on it ever since. I have to say that I usually prefer God to do the first. I mean, wouldn't you? But I don't know how much growth actually occurs when nothing is asked of us. Ultimately, I think it has a lot to do with what we NEED (not always what we want). No doubt, God has chosen to demonstrate His faithfulness to me and I think it's usually when I don't have the strength, energy, or sometimes faith to remember on my own. In those moments I think that God, the Father, either out of pity or loving kindness recognizes my needs and reminds me of His goodness and faithfulness. Call it a time of refreshing, the Holy Spirit speaking, some kind of spiritual battery pack boost, whatever. But I don't think it's growth. It seems to me that growth occurs when God doesn't run to us when we fall off the bike and skin our knee and instantly kisses it away. I think that sometimes God holds back to see what we'll do...will we pitch a huge fit about how he didn't catch us when the bike started wobbling, or will we go to our mental bank account and withdraw on the memory of His previously deposited faithfulness?
One of my all time favorite CS Lewis quotes talks about something very similar. It comes from "The Screwtape Letters" which is a satirical collection of letters from a senior demon to his novice nephew demon. Enjoy! :)
"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."
For me, I think the obedience I'm often called to is remembering God's faithfulness, goodness, and control over every situation. And then once I remember I'm to trust, to stop the sin of worrying, the idolotry of valuing my fretting more than God's perfect providence, and simply rest in Him.
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