Stripped Down to Who You Really Are

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a boy named Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard of treasure, and wakes up to discover he has become a dragon himself. His greed had, quite literally, consumed him. He had become on the outside what he had always been on the inside.

Desperate to shed his dragon skin, Eustace tries scratching it off himself. He peels away one layer, then another, then another — but each time, there is still more dragon underneath. He cannot dig deep enough to reach the boy buried beneath.

Then Aslan appears. The great lion tells Eustace to lie down, and with claws far sharper and deeper than anything Eustace could manage, Aslan tears the dragon skin away. It hurts terribly. But when it is done, Aslan plunges the raw, tender Eustace into clear water, and the boy emerges whole — himself again, for the first time.

Lewis understood something pastors see every Sunday morning. We spend years layering on identities that were never ours — the achiever, the people-pleaser, the self-sufficient one — until we barely recognize ourselves underneath. And we try our own remedies. We read the books. We make the resolutions. We scratch at the surface. But the false self runs deeper than our own hands can reach.

Only the living God can strip us down to who we truly are — beloved children of the Most High. The process may sting. But what emerges is real.