looking for a quote from an old Inklings calendar

[sbarker]

Years ago. in the mid 1980s, I read a quote attributed to Lewis on one of those "Inklings" calendars that were sold through a catalog called Cahill & Company. I regret not having written it down at the time and have been searching for it from time to time ever since. The quote, very roughly, had something to do with the individual Christian being a tiny spark, unable to imagine what a great roaring fire he could become. Does anyone recall this quote? I have read just about all of Lewis's books and have never run across it.

I have just discovered this site and am happy to have stumbled across it. I am a resident of Atlanta, Georgia in the U.S. and have been reading and re-reading Lewis since I first picked up The Screwtape Letters as part of a Young Life Bible study in 1975.

Sandra Barker

[Paul F. Ford]

Have you had glorious fogs-frost-fogs? We have had some of the finest I have ever seen. In fact we have had all sorts of beauty-outside. Inside myself the situation seems quite the reverse. 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.[Warren] 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 along 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). ("24th December 1930," They Stand Together, p. 398)

This is one of my favorite passages in Lewis. I actually saved this calendar page.