The Christians describe the Enemy (Screwtape’s term for God) as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
The “Nothing” referred by Screwtape as “strong” is better said as “no thing”. That is what evil is. It the the “no thing”, the lack of light, the absence of communion, the void, the not. God, on the other hand is light and constitutes “every thing that is”, and without which nothing that is would even exist.
Sin is the absence something. It is a state of being in which we attempt to exist without God in our lives. Sin is a lie, the false illusion of separation from God, and it is truly nothing. It is the absence of something, just as the dark is no thing, but is only the absence of something, light. Treat sin as such and find true peace, joy and love that is in every thing.
Loving every thing,
Z gardener
Good Morning Garden 
Here is a response from a brother gardener, Z.
“It is the absence of something.”
Enlightening perspective, much more powerful than simple avoidance; essential. Thanks!