If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. . C.s. Lewis
About This Quote

We all try to do good works, but our inaction is the result of a default setting in our brain. It's called "default mode network" or DMN. The DMN is sort of like the home base of the brain. When the brain is not busy thinking about other things it defaults back to this network and you can use that time to reflect on your life. This quote doesn't mean that pain isn't painful, it means that it makes you realize that pain has no power over you because you know that you will get through it.

Source: The Problem Of Pain

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