I was thinking today about a talk that a friend of mine gave in Sacrament Meeting back in August. He talked about sometimes struggling spiritually, or of going through periods of spiritual colorlessness; I, of course, in complete sympathy, immediately thought of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis—specifically, #8 (available at http://www.jknirp.com/lewis2.htm), which is about the Law of Undulation. Lewis describes the spiritually hot/cold phenomenon in terms of peaks and troughs; he points out that it's during the trough periods, much more than the peaks, that people are really becoming who God wants them to be. He also points out that our Father in Heaven never leaves us, but "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" (a sentence that took my breath away when I read it in May 1996 and that I still find almost tangibly comforting). I would add to this learning-to-walk metaphor that we're not just children but blind children, taking clumsy, hesitant, bewildered, and tottering steps with groping arms outstretched toward a parent who we can't see and who we can only sometimes hear or feel and who we're not even sure is in the direction we're heading, trying to navigate innumerable unseen obstacles and hoping we don't fall or trip or crash head-first into the coffee table along the way (I have the requisite forehead scar from such an encounter at age 2).