The Lion's Breath

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the boy Eustace Scrubb is transformed into a dragon by his own greed. He is miserable, trapped in a scaly hide that no amount of scratching can remove. He tries again and again to peel away the dragon skin himself, but each time he finds another layer of scales underneath.

Then Aslan appears. The great Lion tells Eustace, "You will have to let me undress you." With one deep tear of his claws, Aslan strips away what Eustace could never remove on his own. It hurts terribly. But underneath the dragon skin, Eustace finds new, tender, human flesh. Aslan then bathes him in clear water, and the healing is complete.

Lewis understood something profound about the nature of healing. We try our own remedies first. We pick at the surface, manage the symptoms, rearrange our habits. But the deepest wounds — the ones that have calcified into part of our identity — require a Healer whose work cuts deeper than we would dare go ourselves.

The prophet Jeremiah asked, "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?" The answer Scripture gives is yes — but the Physician does not merely bandage. He makes all things new.

Healing rarely feels gentle while it is happening. But the hands that wound us into wholeness are the hands of the One who loves us most.