some people need to learn that it's not about themselves only. the whole world doesn't revolve around them.

but i need to learn tt too.

thanks to clara, i've been reading screwtape letters by cs lewis. something i've been wanting to read for the longest time.
lots of things that really strike me, things that are great reminders and offer a deeper yet different perspective of how we sometimes take the way we live to be the most natural thing in the world, even though we're called to be different.

anyway, screwtape letters is basically a collection of letters between Screwtape, a senior devil to his nephew Wormwood, who is a novice demon. Interesting, everything is from the reverse perspective - what is abhorrent is celebrated, what is good and pure and wonderful is hated. God is called The Enemy, but i'll be substituting 'The Enemy' for 'God' in the following excerpts:

"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 God demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face that 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 foodl He wants servants who can finally become sons."

"Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be 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 themselvesl merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve"

"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... ... 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 God'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."

"He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love - a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their ownl when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in God; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left."