Own Who We Are

Original illustration for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by Pauline Baynes

Father, I would ask that You would help me to be rock-solid in You in the middle of all the ups and downs of life. May I be firm when needed but equally merciful. People – kids included – do things that may be abrasive but for the most part, we don’t know all the reasons why. May my heart and mind align with Yours. Amen.
John 4:1-26 (<<click here to read the passage)
At the beginning of yesterday’s post, I asked the question, Do You Ever Feel Stuck? (<<click the title to read it). Many of us feel trapped in the “rat race” we call life.
It may be from different angles but we all can relate to the Samaritan women that Jesus “coincidentally” interacted with. She was stuck. As things were, there was no hope of getting out of the mess her life had become.
But in their conversation about “water”, Jesus here a lifeline of hope! He said,

“Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” vs13-14

Her reply?

“Please, sir, give me this water! Then I’ll never be thirsty again, and I won’t have to come here to get water.” v15

She knew she was stuck, and she was grasping for anything that might alleviate her pain even to some small degree. Gratefully she was on the verge of being impacted by this life-changing “chance” encounter with this strange Jewish man.
Jesus gets to the heart of her pain by telling her, “Go and get your husband” v16. She said she didn’t have one and Jesus acknowledged the truth of the statement but didn’t leave it to stand alone but laid bare her heart. It wasn’t done maliciously but to set things in order He needed her to own who she was.
I am a huge C.S. Lewis fan. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of his Chronicles of Narnia books, we find the story of Eustace. He was a very unlikeable boy who finds himself in a dragon’s lair filled with treasure. He slips on a gold bracelet and falls asleep in the middle of it all in his greed. Lewis writes, “Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.” At first, Eustace likes being the biggest thing around, but he quickly realizes he is cut off from his friends, and all of humanity, and he feels a weight of loneliness and desperately wants to change.
That night, Aslan (the lion) comes to Eustace and leads him to a large well “like a very big round bath with marble steps going down into it.” The water was so clear, and he thought if he could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in his leg (from the gold bracelet he had put on when he was human). But Aslan told him he had to undress first.
Isn’t that what Jesus was asking of the Samaritan woman? Doesn’t He ask that of us? As Lewis wrote in Letters to Malcolm: “We must lay before him [God] what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
Eustace found that no matter how many layers of dragon skins he managed to peel off of himself, he was still a dragon.
“Then the lion said…‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.
“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. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”…
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off … And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again…” – C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*
Eustace’s story is a great example of how we are stuck and no matter what we do, we cannot get unstuck! It is beyond our ability…but that is not the case for Jesus! He is the absolute best at unsticking us! He loves us right where we are but has the ability to get us where we need to be. He did it for the Samaritan woman and, gratefully, He does it for us too!

*special thanks to Jennifer Neyhart and her blog post, C. S. Lewis: The Undragoning of Eustace

Apr 28^th, 2021, Wed, 8:16 pm