The Skin Only Aslan Could Remove

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a boy named Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart — and wakes up as a dragon himself. His selfishness has become his skin. He is trapped inside a body that finally matches the smallness he had been living with all along.

What happens next is the part that stops me every time. Eustace tries to fix himself. He scratches and claws at the dragon hide, peeling away one layer, then another, then another. Each time he thinks he has reached the boy underneath, he looks down and finds more scales. He cannot dig deep enough on his own.

Then Aslan comes. And Aslan says, "You will have to let me undress you." The lion's claws cut far deeper than Eustace ever dared to go. It hurts terribly. But when Aslan throws him into the water, Eustace comes up with boy's skin again — tender, new, and real.

Lewis understood something every pastor sees: we spend years trying to peel off the identities we have accumulated — the performer, the people-pleaser, the one who has to earn every scrap of love. We scratch and scratch, but we cannot get to the person underneath.

Only God cuts that deep. Only the Almighty reaches past every false self we have built and touches who we actually are — the beloved child He made before we ever layered on the scales.

You cannot undress yourself. But He can.