I kneel next to my bed in earnest prayer and there stretched out before me at the end of my arm, is a small scale diagram in flesh of my own journey through life, tracked out in the ridges of my own hand. “Oh Lord, here I am again,” that little graphic reminds me. “Down here in the ditch!”
Leave it to C.S. Lewis to give a name to our mortal propensity for a life of ups and downs. He called it the Law of Undulations (quaint phrase!) in his Screwtape Letters. And he properly explained why it is so important to understand this pattern of life.
If you don’t understand it, Satan has a subtle advantage. For when we are in the valleys of life, he can whisper in our minds, “Oh bummer. Rough stuff, you poor thing. You realize don’t you, that your life will be like this forever. It sucks now and always will. Stretching on out there in eternal bleakness. This dark mood will never change. The rain will never stop. This challenge will never get better. You will never be happy again.”
Our enemy operates not unlike the Dementors in Harry Potter, who glide about, tormenting their prisoners by causing them to relive their worst memories, and making them feel like they’d “never be cheerful again.”
When I hear of people taking their own lives, I know Satan laughs, and wonder if his whisperings were believed. But the message is a lie, as messages from the father of lies always are. For the sun comes out again. And you will not always feel the way you feel today.
Interestingly enough, he tells the same lie to those who are up on one of life’s mountaintops.
When life is at a high point for you, when you are feeling blessed and close to God, Satan is sure to try and get in this same whisper.
“Oh, congratulations. You just got baptized! (Or found true love, or had a spiritual experience, or a communications breakthrough. Whatever.) Well it’s nice to know that life will be good now. You certainly deserve it. What a great future you have to look forward to. It will be smooth sailing from now on!”
Of course you don’t fall for this, do you? You see the trap. As soon as life settles back down and the next serious bump in the road comes up, there’s the little imp, all ready with his line: “Oh darn. You’ve really blown it. It was too good to be true." Or, "You’re not really cut out to be a Mormon after all. (Or “love never lasts” or “you aren’t really the spiritual type,” or “Nothing good lasts in my family.”) Now you've got the proof. Don’t let yourself get fooled again. Might as well give up now and not set yourself up again.”
You see what he does. When we’re up he tries to convince us that we should always feel this good so that we will be devastated when life’s road curves inexorably down off the mountain top and back into the next valley. And when we’re down in some serious valley, he tries to discourage us by convincing us that life will remain unremittingly bleak from here to forever. Both are useful lies in his arsenal.
The antidote is truth. In truth, the road of life goes up and down. Some times the hills and valleys are gentle; sometimes it feels more like peaks and ravines. All life is cyclical. Energy, light, heat, all of it travels in waves. The earth cycles through spring, summer, fall, winter and then goes back to spring, summer, fall, winter. After the rain, the sun comes out. After stretches of sunny weather, storms will inevitably come again.
I can’t remember why I was in my room crying my eyes out one day when I was in my twenties, but I remember my dad poking his head in sympathetically and saying wisely, “It’s just weather of the soul, honey.” He knew.
