...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 as 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 would have seen this undulation in every department of his life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use 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 favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than 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 (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 8).
We see this Law at work all around us. Our converted spirits long to commune with God, and yet our bodies are mortal, and therefore predisposed to change. The glorious times "on the mountain" are followed by times "in the valley" where the clouds of life hang over us and dim our eyes. And it is in these times of darkness and confusion when the enemy of our souls, aided by Screwtape-like spirits, casts his web of deception. We question His motives...a loving God wouldn't cause us pain, would He? A loving God couldn't stand by and watch me suffer like this, could He? And without understanding the true nature of the Father, we recreate Him to be something He is not. And if we don't know God, how can we grow in His image? That, after all, is the goal, is it not? To glorify God and to be renewed and remade into the image of His Son.
Part of knowing God, however, includes this element of reconciling the pain and sorrow of this life with the good God Who allows these things to be. I know I will never be able to grasp the fullness of Him; I will never wrap my mind around Who He is. But I know that Life is in His hands...not a petal falls from a wilting flower without His eyes seeing it. For me, that is enough to give me peace to sleep at nights. To know that God is in control, regardless of the chaos and randomness that my human eyes perceive.
The Law of Undulation states that change is a part of life; troughs and peaks are a natural process that, when surrendered to, can yield wonderful fruit. But one element never changes..."Yesterday, today, and forever Jesus is the same. All may change but Jesus never, glory to His name."
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