Disclaimer: Narnia, its people, its land, and its magic were created by C.S. Lewis and belong to him and his heirs. I just like to walk in his world quite often.
I didn’t know Him by the name of Aslan, not till after I died. Not till I met Him as my four children knew Him. The Lion of Judah became a bit more real then.
I knew Him by a different name, but I knew Him. I knew Him as only desperate mothers know Him, when we had to raise families alone, during a war that never should have been necessary. When we wondered if we saw their husbands for the last time, only to turn and wonder if we’d watch our children die.
And I knew the cost He required of me. The highest cost, that I would watch my children suffer and not be able to shield them. That a cost would be required of them, and I could not pay it for them.
They left for the country, and I thought, “this is the cost.” They left without their parents, and I stayed to work, to save those who’d paid a cost for the war that would scar them the rest of their lives. And I prayed to Him every night for my children, and thanked Him that they were safe.
And then they came back, and they weren’t. They’d fallen in love with the country mansion they’d lived in, even giving it its own name of “Narnia.” The professor treated them like kings and queens. They’d even – they’d grown up, there without me watching, and suddenly I wasn’t left to parent alone. I wasn’t left to be a parent at all.
And my four, ones I’d given birth to, they worked and lived and tried to smile, but their hearts weren’t in London at all. It was rare I could make it home for them. Rarely could I give them what they gave each other, when suddenly only the four of them existed in a world none of us knew anything about. Peter with the look of a king, calm and steady and blazing with light, Susan with the grace of a queen, gentle but piercing in her beauty, Edmund with the wisdom that made me shiver and feel small and yet welcome, and Lucy with the joy that had to be heavenly. Kings and queens, sitting in my living room, while I stood outside in the doorway and ached. In so many ways they were not my own.
Only they weren’t mine to begin with. He gave them to me, each a baby in my arms, a blessing He sent to rest with my husband and I. And if we prayed for help with those blessings, when Edmund darkened, when Susan lost the heart-deep grace for grace in a pair of my heels – I shouldn’t find myself complaining when He answered.
When He took my own and made them His.
When every prayer I’d made for my children’s hearts and souls was answered beyond what I had asked, beyond what I had imagined.
And He added a love for their father and I that only increased. If we could not offer our four a home for their hearts, we could offer them someone to love and lean on, and a place to come and rest. When Christ gave us the ability to give our children those beautiful things, He gave the two of us a family of kings and queens that were ours to love and be loved by.
One that was His, not just my own.