Dragon Skin

"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." -- Eustace Scrubb in C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

My friend sat on the edge of her mattress, on the verge of tears. The hopelessness and frustration in her voice made my heart ache for her, made me want to reach out with more than a hand or the consolatory words I could muster up in the moment. The words she used to describe her struggle snagged on my memory of words I knew I had spoken or written, months previously. On impulse I scampered away and returned with a small journal in my hand. "Can I read to you?" I asked. She nodded. 

It had been a few months since I'd opened that journal, and I loved the feeling of it in my hands. It wasn't just a travel journal I'd filled with pencil print from Germany to Turkey to Jordan to Israel back to Germany again; it was a receptacle of personal thoughts, emotions, and observations that I've never let anyone read. I hadn't even read back over most of these myself since the time I'd written them. 

I wondered if starting to read from that journal would be a horrible idea.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I leafed through the pages, propelled by memories of bleak hours when I, too, had sat on the edge of somewhere, on the verge of tears. I could tell when these times had been by the subtle alteration in my handwriting. And I read. Where it applied, I read through the messy bits, the confused bits, the frustrated bits, the scathing critiques of myself, the questions to God. 

But I knew there were hopeful bits coming, answers to prayer that were a long time coming but infinitely better answers as a result. A major aspect of those answers were in the very act of getting mucky and wading through the questions. Transformation doesn't always happen in clear water. Eustace had to have his dragon skin scraped off. 

I continued to thumb through, to the culmination of particular struggles and stories, the ones I'd chosen to compose coherently in that little travel journal. Embedded there I rediscovered verses, quotes, prayers...and metaphors of sinfulness, forgiveness, and grace I could hardly remember pressing into those pages.

It was as if my past self had written a prescient letter to my current self, to the current self that now sat in front of a good friend, self-revealing in the hopes of healing. 

Somewhere in the course of this I started crying, struggling to keep it together and keep reading, because in that moment I saw a glimpse of God's work in my life over the last several months, felt his ever-present love. I looked up, and the tears were now streaming down my friend's face too. 

Writing has this power to surprise. To drop in our laps what has been lost through the holes in our pockets of memory. To soothe current wounds with the salve of past processes of healing and the wisdom that comes from this whole operation. To apply to several people in myriad different ways, but in simultaneously, bewilderingly pertinent ways. To tear into us deeply and painfully and pleasurably -- again. To pencil on our hearts remembrance of and thankfulness for God's transformative work in very broken beings.