"Our Perfect God Of Sharp Corners And Rough Edges"

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake...I call upon Him in prayer. Often He might reply - I think He does reply - "But you have been evading me for hours." For He comes not only to raise up but to cast down; to deny, to rebuke, to interrupt...If I never fled from His presence then I should suspect those moments when I seemed to delight in it of being wish -fulfillment dreams. That, by the way, explains the feebleness of all those watered versions of Christianity which leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation. No real belief in the watered versions can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee. You and I have both known happy marriage. But how different our wives were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to all our wishes; and for that very reason (among others) so incomparably better. Servile fear is, to be sure, the lowest form of religion. But a god such that there could never be occasion for even servile fear, a 'safe' god, a tame god, soon proclaims himself to any sound mind as fantasy. I have met no people who fully disbelieved in Hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven.
C.S.Lewis
Letters to Malcolm, pp 75-76