Open Heart Surgery

I doubt many of us have to think very hard to conjure up the parts of ourselves that we would love to get rid of. I would go further to say that for most of us there’s probably one nagging thing that’s just unrelenting. For some of us it may be something like lightning-quick temper, debilitating insecurity, or the seemingly endless rise and fall of depression. For some of us it may be a secret sin, or maybe a not-so-secret sin. For some it’s the substances that numb the pain that seems to find it’s way in every single day. For some of us it’s just the lack of consistency in the things we really wish we were consistent at.

For some, it isn’t even anything that you’ve done. Some of you can’t let go of the way you were taken advantage of, the way you were broken. Some of you can’t move past the abuse you’ve endured that causes you to feel less than human and completely unlovable. Some of you live every day with scars, physical and emotional, that were put there by somebody else, and it was completely out of your control.

But regardless of the situation, most of us have some kind of nagging pain that we would love to get rid of. And try as we may, no matter how much willpower we exert, no matter how many self-help books we read, no matter how many friends we let in, we just can’t seem to break free. Sure, there are momentary victories. There are seasons of a day or a week or a year when we feel like we’ve finally gotten there. But then when we examine ourselves, there is that ugly little blot, staring up at us again.

I’m going to share a rather long excerpt from a book I’m reading – I hope you’re not too cool for fairy tales, and I hope you’ll take the time to read on.

    “I knew it was a well because you could see the water bubbling up from the bottom of it: but it was a lot bigger than most wells — like a very big round bath with marble steps going down into it. 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 off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is 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 knobby-looking than the others had been. 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.”

—Excerpt from: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you. But how beautiful, and how accurate, is this passage? Isn’t this how we are? We have a pain, we have something we want to be rid of, so we peel at ourselves and we really think we’re getting somewhere. But when we look, we see we haven’t really gotten anywhere.

The truth is that I believe God really wants us free of these things. Maybe you don’t believe in God, and that’s okay. Well, I say it’s okay because I don’t think less of you for it, but my heart breaks for you. Because I believe without him you will always be tearing off the first layer of pain, but leaving behind the thick, dark, knobby stuff that he would peel away if only you would let him.

The honest truth is that I believe God doesn’t just want us rid of these pains, but I believe He wants us rid of them more than we want rid of them ourselves. I believe He wants us rid of them so badly that He debased Himself and clothed Himself in His own creation to be tortured in our place – because we had committed cosmic treason, not Him – in order to afford us respite. Not just respite, but real and lasting rest.

But God knows that the pain we want rid of isn’t the most important pain to be rid of. We want rid of the surface pain. We want rid of the shortcoming, the addiction, the memories. He wants us rid of those too, but he wants us rid of more. He wants us rid of the selfish human nature that feeds the pain. And that’s why only He can rip it away for us. And that’s why it hurts so much more when He does it. Because when we do it we are ripping at scabs, but when He does it He is ripping at our very heart. We want a facial; He wants to give us open heart surgery.

I don’t really know how to end this thought, probably because I’m still on the operating table myself. But I hope you know that you aren’t the only one going through pain. And I hope you know that you aren’t the only one that goes through a different and more intense kind of pain as you try to get better. But what I really want you to know is this: I’m utterly convinced that if we allow God to do the ripping away, we will walk away changed — no longer a dragon, no longer a beast we can’t stand to look at in the mirror, no longer a debased and less-than version of ourselves. We will walk away our true selves. Different than we ever imagined, better than we ever dreamed, and so very, very full.