You and I, who see the patient's position as it really is, must never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him.

We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the enemy,

but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have affected this change, of course,

are trivial and revocable.

He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly,

heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of

utmost space.

The Christians describe the enemy as one without whom nothing is strong, and nothing is very strong,

strong enough to steal away man's best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary

flickering of the mind.

All right, that is not Dante, but C.S. Lewis, the screw tape letters, a book I suspect many

of my listeners have read, but C.S. Lewis, the screw tape letters, a book I suspect many of my listeners

have read, but I love rereading this book. It's always so potent. And that line, nothing is

very strong, which the devils say to one another in hell. They're describing the condition

of being absent from God, which is the classical view of what hell is.

And they're saying that the nothingness of sin, the kind of emptiness and futility of

departing from goodness and choosing other things that seem promising maybe in the moment,

but ultimately have nothing of real value

in them. When you do that, you quickly or slowly, it doesn't matter which, you begin to lose

all your momentum, all your fuel, right? Because goodness actually is human fuel. This is something

that we really don't grasp enough. We don't spend enough time

dwelling in this because we spend so much time scolding each other for the things we do wrong

...