Hindrances

From C. S. Lewis’s last letter in 1930 to his friend Arthur Greeves, written shortly after his brother had come to live with him and his household:

I seem to go steadily downhill and backwards.  I am certainly further from self control and charity and light than I was last spring.  Now that W. is with us I don’t get enough solitude: or so I say to myself in excuse, knowing all the time that what God demands is our solution of the problem set, not of some other problem which we think he ought to have set: and that what we call hindrances are really the raw material of spiritual life.  As if the fire should call the coal a hindrance!  (One can imagine a little young fire, which had been getting on nicely with the sticks and paper, regarding it as a mere cruelty when the big lumps were put on: never dreaming what a huge steady glow, how far surpassing its present crackling infancy, the Tender of the Fire designed when he stoked it.) — Collected Letters 1:944.