The Dragon Skin Only Aslan Could Remove

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes to discover he has become a dragon himself. His greed has quite literally transformed him. Desperate, Eustace tries to scratch off the dragon skin. He peels away one layer, then another, then a third — but beneath each scaly surface lies more scale. He cannot dig deep enough to reach what he once was.

Then Aslan appears. "You will have to let me undress you," the lion says. And Aslan's claws cut so deep that Eustace feels the tear go straight into his heart. It hurts far worse than anything Eustace did to himself. But when it is finished, the dragon skin lies in a heap on the grass, and the boy stands new and tender, plunged into clear water that stings and then soothes.

Lewis understood what every wounded soul eventually discovers: our own efforts at healing only scratch the surface. We rearrange habits, manage symptoms, peel back one layer of pain only to find another beneath it. True healing requires hands other than our own — hands strong enough to cut to the very core of what ails us, and gentle enough to carry us into the water afterward.

The Almighty does not heal us by leaving us comfortable. He heals us by going deeper than we ever dared to go ourselves.