good friends - good reminders

The Lord keeps sending me messages through other people. I keep reading them knowing He is saying something but I still feel too dull to fully comprehend. My emotions are flat and hard to define. It's like they are walled up within me somewhere but I can't get to them.

BUT I sense that Resurrection from this grave is coming ...

here are a couple of things that friends have sent to me in the stream of reminders...

from a friend's dreams:

I wanted to let you know that you've been on my heart and in my dreams twice this week. I'm awake for the second time recently with a distinct impression to pray for you and today with two images that I can't get out of my mind and I think are for you- a phonograph (you in the recent past proclaiming what the spirit told you) and a phonogram (you now, waiting to have new messages recorded onto you from the spirit) and these are sitting by the tide- steady, unchanging, and faithful to its schedule of highs and lows, just like our walks in faith. I don't know why these images and I don't know anything more than that they're yours, as are my prayers.

and another friend sent me this - from C.S. Lewis' Screw Tape Letters:

My Dear Wormwood,

So you have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away, have you?  I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure!  Has no one ever told you about the law of undulation?

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal.  (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.)  As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.  This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.  Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.  If you had watched your patient carefully you wouldve seen this undulation in every part of his life - his interests in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. ...

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite.  Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks, some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs that anyone else.  The reason is this.  To us a human is primarily food, our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.  But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing.  One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth.  He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome 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.  We want cattle who can finally become food.  He wants servants who can finally become sons.  We want to suck in, He wants to give out.  We are empty and would be filled, He is full and flows over.  Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in.  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 the the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use.  Merely to override 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 overwhelming 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 He 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 the human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon the universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.