From Dragon to Boy Again

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the selfish boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes to discover he has become a dragon himself. His greed has literally reshaped him. He is horrified. For the first time in his life, he longs to be near the people he once scorned. He tries to scratch off the dragon skin himself, peeling away layer after layer, but each time there is another scaly hide underneath.

Then Aslan appears. The great lion tells Eustace to lie down, and with His own claws — claws that cut far deeper than anything Eustace could manage — He tears the dragon skin away. It hurts terribly. But beneath it is the tender, new skin of a boy. Aslan throws Eustace into a pool of water, and the sting gives way to relief, then joy.

Lewis understood something every pastor sees: we cannot transform ourselves. We try. We peel back one bad habit only to find another underneath. We resolve and fail and resolve again. Real transformation requires a deeper surgery than self-improvement can offer. It requires the hands of the Living God — hands that wound in order to heal, that strip away what we have become so we can finally become who He made us to be.

The good news is this: the Almighty does not leave us in our dragon skin. He comes to us, even there.