The Dragon Who Needed Undressing

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the insufferable boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes up transformed into a dragon himself. His greedy thoughts have become his skin. He tries desperately to scratch off the scales, peeling away layer after layer, but each time he looks down, another dragon hide remains underneath. He cannot shed what he has become through his own effort.

Then Aslan appears. The great Lion tells Eustace, "You will have to let me undress you." His claws cut deeper than anything Eustace managed on his own — so deep it hurts — but beneath all those layers of scale and selfishness, a boy emerges. Aslan throws him into the water, and Eustace is himself again. Not the old self, but something truer.

We spend years layering identities over ourselves — the performer, the people-pleaser, the one who never measures up. We try to peel them off through self-help, willpower, or reinvention. But the dragon skin goes deeper than our fingernails can reach.

The Almighty does not simply improve our old identity. He strips it away entirely and names us new creations. As Paul writes, "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here."

The transformation hurts. But what remains underneath is who you were always meant to be.