When Only the Lion's Claws Could Go Deep Enough

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes to discover he has become a dragon himself. His greed has turned him into the thing he treasured most. Miserable and alone, Eustace tries to fix himself. He scratches at his scales and peels away a layer of dragon skin, only to find another layer underneath. He tears it off again. Another layer. No matter how hard he claws, he cannot reach the boy buried beneath.

Then Aslan appears. The great Lion tells Eustace to lie down, and with claws far sharper and deeper than anything Eustace could manage, Aslan tears the dragon skin away — all of it, down to the tender new flesh. It hurts terribly. But then Aslan throws him into a well of clear water, and Eustace emerges as a boy again.

Lewis understood something every wounded person eventually learns: our deepest healing cannot be self-administered. We can peel back a layer or two through willpower and good intentions, but the wounds that have calcified around our hearts require hands stronger and more precise than our own. The Almighty does not heal us by leaving us comfortable in our scales. He goes deeper than we would dare, not to destroy us, but to find us underneath it all — and make us fully human again.