It’s been an emotional week.

But that’s partly my own fault. After all, I had to go and listen to this heartrending testimony …

Jonathan Gass’s story is remarkable for how it consisted of essentially unremitting pain until he came to Christ … and then, for how fast he came to Christ and was transformed.

I say remarkable, but I don’t say unique. Many, many other men and women out there are, as we speak, going through the same unremitting pain. This does not make his story easier to listen to. But look at the peace on his face now.

And then, the same week I listened to Jonathan, I was reading my class of elementary-school students The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I came upon this passage:

For a second after Aslan breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back–then it spread–then the color seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper–then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stone folds rippled into living hair. Then he opened his great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn. And now his hind legs had come to life. He lifted one of them and scratched himself. Then, having caught sight of Aslan, he went bounding after him and frisking round him whimpering with delight and jumping up to lick his face.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, p. 184

Aslan turns him back into a lion, and he immediately starts behaving like … a lion.

But not only the individual creatures, but the Witch’s house itself is a picture of a human soul:

“Now for the inside of this house!” said Aslan. “Look alive, everyone. Up stairs and down stairs and in my lady’s chamber! Leave no corner unsearched. You never know where some poor prisoner may be concealed.”

But at last the ransacking of the Witch’s fortress was ended. The whole castle stood empty with every door and window open and the light and the sweet spring air flooding in to all the dark and evil places which needed them so badly.

[And when the castle gates had been knocked down from the inside], and when the dust had cleared it was odd, standing in that dry, grim, stony yard, to see through the gap all the grass and waving trees and sparkling streams of the forest, and blue hills beyond that and beyond them the sky.

ibid, pp. 187 – 189