A Contemporary Screwtape Letter
My dear Wormwood,
I don’t know how you haven’t yet thought of a plan that is so obvious. Just have your patient spend hours aimlessly browsing social media outlets. While a few from the Enemy’s camp use it to share some of what He calls the good news, don’t worry, just get your patient hooked. Once hooked, he’ll waste time that he doesn’t realize is precious, and will waste even more time thinking of all the “perfect” pictures and stories that everyone is posting, which will make him feel like he’s the only one who struggles. This will then rouse all kinds of great feelings like jealousy and envy from those he thought he “loved”… whatever that means. Or he’ll get depressed from all our victory stories of evil in the world. Both are great gains.
Oh and you’d do a great job if you could get him to waste two very important times of day, the first and last moments of each day. Having him wake to social media is likely to set the perfect pace for his day, and remove his focus from the Enemy. He’ll be too distracted to focus on anything. The Enemy knows how important those first few moments are and wrote about them in that Book of His and even set the example when He became like one of them on earth. Oh don’t remind me of that! But don’t worry, your patient can easily forget those instances. He’s easily distracted thanks to our years of impact on the media.
And the last few moments of the day are as important. That’s when he is likely to practice that horrific practice of “metanoia” or self-reflexivity which leads to repentance… oh I hate that word. The Enemy created him as the only creature capable of practicing “metanoia,” and you must do everything you can to prevent that from happening, because when it does, the Enemy fills him with that incomprehensible thing called grace, and shapes his character through his failures. We want his failures to crush him, but the Enemy somehow manages to use them to shape and refine him. This serves to further strengthen the bond between your patient and the Enemy and you must not allow that to happen. Get to work, Wormwood.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape