I Will Go With You

When you were about eight, your father began reading the Chronicles of Narnia to you. He would do it at night before bed. You would sit on the couch curled into his side and watch the print lift from the pages and become Narnia held in your father’s palms.

Then there was Aslan who, in your mind, could not be held by text. He was real. As real as any person your parents read about in the paper or saw on TV, but could not touch. Only the problem was, you didn’t know how to summon him, how to make him come to you. So like the children that fell in and out of Narnia, you felt you had to wait your turn.

A couple years after you and your father finished the books, your family moved to England, the place where all the Narnia adventures began. Only it wasn’t easy for you to adjust. Your preteen moods and awkwardness made you clumsy in the British landscape. Try as you might to run smooth like water over stone, you always seemed to catch on edges and come home crying.

One evening you sat on your mother’s lap. She rubbed your back and told you to “give it to Jesus.” And so you did. You prayed. You asked him with all your heart to take away the edges or make you fluid like silk -- but he didn’t.

After three years there came a day when you were on your bed still crying, and maybe it was a gray day; maybe it was wet outside like it was wet inside all over your quilt. But you don’t remember that. What you remember is feeling someone come into the room. Thinking it was your mother, you stopped crying and looked up, but there was no one there. No one standing in your door.

And then he came to you, bounding out of all of those years, out of some deep place, until you could almost see him as you felt him. He was too large to take in all at once. His presence somehow defied the walls.

Do you remember what he said? Do you remember the words he spoke in that moment? The way the heat of his presence made your whole body warm?

He said: I will go with you