There is a danger in feeling that you have "arrived". This danger lies in the fact it very probably means that you still have a long way to go. It is deceptive. There is also a very imminent danger in living your faith as though you have God figured out. It probably means that he is about to expose you to the infinite plane of his character. I long so much to be like Lucy, who ventures into Narnia wide-eyed and confident believing even in this unknown world there is One who is sovereign. But more often than not I am like Susan. I hem and haw. I peer back through the trees wondering if I made the right decision, scared to venture into new worlds that I can't control or predict.
I love this scene from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
"...Aslan is a lion--the Lion, the great Lion."
"Ooh!" said Susan, "I'd thought he was a man. Is he--quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver, "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe?'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King I tell you."
He is the King. And he is the King of my life who is good. Good beyond my wildest dreams or imagination. The Bible tells us this very thing. He is the God who does more than we can ask or imagine. I think he delights in doing things that we can't imagine because it stretches us and causes us to use the imaginations he gave us. What's the point in having a safe God who we can predict and imagine? Who could have imagined the good news of the cross? That God would come down himself and die for our sins?
I think Susan would not have been so terrified if she understood Aslan's heart more deeply. In confidence of his goodness she would have ventured forth with the faith of a child and enjoyed her walk through Narnia. So as I sit on the edge of a chapter of my life, I want be brave and walk through the doors of the wardrobe intrepidly. There's only grace!
Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures or statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images – sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. - C. S. Lewis