The will to walk.

I started reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I've always wanted to read it because I'd heard really good things about it, but it was just one of those books that I never got around to. Well, I finally got around to it. I checked it out from the library and I am so glad that I did. It's really good. Reading it has made me more aware to how incredibly subtle the adversary can be. Sometimes I like to think that he only dwells in the black territory, where what is wrong is indisputably obvious. But that's not true at all. I think where he does his best work is in the gray territory, where the line between what is wrong and right can be blurred and refracted without us even realizing it.
The thing I like the most about this book is how much more it has helped me to understand about the nature of God. I don't know if it's the fact that the whole book is written in the form of letters, or because it's from the perspective of the adversary, or if it's simply because C.S. Lewis is a genius, but there is something about this book that makes God feel so much closer.

Here is a passage from it that I really liked:

"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 temptations, 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 still 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."

Deep stuff.
Well, I better go do my homework now.

The fat, fat eagle.

Since it's winter break and I no longer have any purpose in life, I was helping my little brother Lance with his homework. It was pretty simple. It took us all of seven minutes to finish it. The main thing he had to do was read this absolutely ridiculous story not once, but twice. I couldn't stop laughing the whole time he read it. My laughing is the main reason that it took us a whopping seven minutes to finish his homework. Let me just say, they have definitely spiced up the curriculum since I was in elementary school.
Here's the story:

The Fat Eagle

An eagle liked to eat. He ate cake and ham and corn. He ate and ate, and he got fatter and fatter. He said, "I am so fat that I can not fly." He sat in a tree and the other eagles made fun of him. They said, "Look at that fat, fat eagle. Ho, ho."

The fat, fat eagle was sitting in a tree when a tiger came hunting for eagles. The tiger went after a little eagle that was sitting under the tree. The other eagles yelled, but the little eagle did not hear them.

The fat, fat eagle looked down and said, "I must save the little eagle." So he jumped from the tree. He came down like a fat rock on the tiger. And the tiger ran far away. 

Now the other eagles do not make fun of the fat, fat eagle. They give him cake and ham and corn. 

This is the end.

Is that not ridiculous? I think the part that got me most was how the author felt the need to consistently introduce the eagle as the "fat, fat" eagle. Clearly one "fat" was not sufficient. And what is the life lesson this story is teaching, anyway? All I got was it's ok to be fat as long as you use your fat for good.