The Dragon Skin We Cannot Shed Alone

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 find he has become a dragon himself. His greed has turned him into the thing he loved most. Miserable and alone, Eustace tries to fix himself. He scratches at the scales and peels off a layer of dragon skin, only to discover another layer underneath. He tears away a second skin, then a third. Each time, the same rough scales stare back at him.

Then Aslan appears. "You will have to let me undress you," the lion says. And his claws cut far deeper than Eustace ever dared to go. Lewis writes that the first tear was so deep "I thought it had gone right into my heart." It hurt worse than anything Eustace had done to himself. But when Aslan was finished, he threw the boy into clear water, and Eustace emerged with new, soft, human skin.

This is how the Healer works. We try our self-help programs, our resolutions, our three easy steps. We peel back a layer and feel better for a week. But the wound beneath the wound beneath the wound — only God goes that deep. His healing is not gentle in the way we expect, but it is thorough in the way we need.

The hands that bear scars are the only hands that can reach our deepest ones.