Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I love the Narnia books...I am passionate about them. God has used them in my life in so many ways. My sweet cousin Elizabeth and her mom, Aunt Lucy, introduced me to them when I was about 12. I adored them, and read them over and over. I still read them over and over, and have loved sharing them with my children. As C.S. Lewis aptly noted,

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally worth reading at the age of fifty."

I really wonder whether the movie can do them justice...we will see. There will be no more difficult-to-please critic, I am sure!

I'm reading them aloud to my crew. We just finished the part where Eustace becomes a dragon, and then Aslan brings him to wash in the deep well. He commands Eustace to remove his clothes, and Eustace is puzzled until he realizes that Aslan must mean to shed his dragon skin. So he scratches away, and is quite pleased to see the old skin shedding, but when he goes to wash, he sees that the skin is just as hard and scaly as before. Three times he attempts to remove the dragon skin on his own, working furiously, and seeing some progress, but then realizing every time he looks in the pool that his attempts have had very little effect. Aslan says to Eustace, "You will have to let me undress you." And Eustace lays down to allow him to do so.

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off...Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off -- just as I thought I had done the other three times; only they hadn't hurt -- and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been."

What a masterful description of how it works in our lives when we attempt in our own strength to deal with our sin. We think we are doing pretty well, but then we get another glimpse of ourselves when another difficult circumstance arises, and we see the truth about ourselves as Eustace did when he saw his reflection in the pool. So we must just surrender and allow God to deal with us, by stripping away the things that keep us from HIm. And it can be quite painful, cutting us to the heart. But, when sin is stripped away, we can see how much uglier it is than we even imagined. And then...we are smaller...there is less of self. As John the Baptist said, "I must decrease, and He must increase."

Lord, increase in my life, strip away my sin, until self is small and insignificant, and you are all.