Instead, this is my prayer for this year. Sanctification. Roll that word around your tongue for a minute.
I feel like it always comes for me anyway. This sanctification. This tear off of who I think I should be and who I am in Him. Constantly beckoning with the murmur similar to the kind the snow makes when it's falling. One that sings of pummeling thousands of miles to the ground, but somehow finds it's place gently among the glittering unity.
This time, I'm boldly approaching His throne, asking Him to tell me what He thinks of me. Asking for Him to define me. To be what defines me. Begging Him to violently tear away all the ugly of me that so fully reflects my love for this world. To love me despite me. He already does that.
I pray you will ask Him to do the same for you. Maybe we'll meet up along this gravel road and share our scars. Because we will certainly fall. We will most certainly do more than scrape our knees. Surely, we'll bloody our noses. Maybe even the noses of our brothers. But I hope to meet you along that beautiful gravel road where we will breathe in stories and breath out the hope that stems from the aroma of grace and mercy and justice that will surely surround us.
Happy New Year, friends. His mercies are new each morning - not just tomorrow.
“The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg. but the lion told me I must undress first. Mind you, I don’t know if he said any words out loud or not.
I was just going to say that I couldn’t undress because I hadn’t any clothes on when I suddenly thought that dragons are snaky sort of things and snakes can cast their skins. Oh, of course, thought I, that’s what the lion means. So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place. And then I scratched a little deeper and , instead of just scales coming off here and there, my whole skin started peeling off beautifully, like it does after an illness, or as if I was a banana. In a minute or two I just stepped out of it. I could see it lying there beside me, looking rather nasty. It was a most lovely feeling. So I started to go down into the well for my bathe.
But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before. Oh, that’s all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and I’ll have to get out of it too. So I scratched and tore again and this underskin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe.
Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.
Then the lion said – but I don’t know if it spoke – ‘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 of 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 – just as I thought I’d done it myself 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 was I was 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
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