The Dragon Who Could Not Undress Himself

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard while thinking greedy, dragonish thoughts — and wakes up transformed into an actual dragon. His selfishness has finally made him on the outside what he always was on the inside. Desperate to become a boy again, Eustace tries scratching off the dragon skin himself. He peels away one layer, then another, then another — but there is always more dragon underneath. He cannot go deep enough.

Then Aslan appears. "You will have to let me undress you," the great lion says. And His claws cut far deeper than Eustace ever dared go himself. It hurts terribly. But when Aslan finishes, He throws the raw, tender Eustace into a well of clear water, and the boy emerges whole — truly himself for the first time.

This is the gospel of identity. We spend years trying to peel away our own layers — the masks, the habits, the false selves we have constructed. We read the books, attend the seminars, make the resolutions. And we find there is always more dragon underneath. The work of becoming who we truly are is not something we can do alone. It requires the hands of the One who made us.

As the Almighty declares through Isaiah: "I have called you by name; you are Mine." Our deepest identity is not something we construct. It is something we receive — spoken over us by the God who knew us before we ever lost our way.