He must labour to make us loveable

 In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious & less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

Another type is the love of a man for a beast -- a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolise the relation between God & men; "we are His people & the sheep of His pasture." This is in some ways a better analogy than the preceding, because the inferior party is sentient, & yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast & does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man & dog is primarily for the man's sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, & that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog's interests are not sacrificed to the man's. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the "best" of irrational creatures, & a proper object for a man to love -- of course, with that degree & kind of love which is proper to such an object, & not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations -- man interferes with the dog & makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, & habits which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal; & is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the "goodness" of man: but the full-grown & full-trained dog, larger, healthier, & longer-lived than the wild dog, & admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, & comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains with the dog, & gives all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale -- because it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses -- that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more Love, but for less.
Excerpted from Problem of Pain, C S Lewis