My very favorite stories of all time is “The Chronicles of Narnia”. My parents introduced me to them when I was six, and I am pretty sure they regretted it several times over with how much I’ve watched the movies, read the books, and quoted the works. They are beautiful stories full of adventure, forgiveness, and redemption. The lion Aslan is perhaps the greatest character of English literature (in my opinion at least), and the works themselves have been regarded as some of the greatest English classics.
As with any other story, I get super sad when I reach the end of each book. Because in the end of each one, the children who have been called out from their own world (our own) have to leave Narnia and return to their homes. While they are always sad to go back and leave the land they love, they go back to their own world completely changed. They are older, wiser, and stronger than they were before.
Right now, I feel as if I’m on the Narnian side. I know I have to return to my own world soon. It’s a world I don’t recognize anymore. It’s one that I have not lived in for three months. I have changed. I am not the same person that I was when I left the United States. And honestly, I’m sad and even a little bit afraid to return to my own world.
But my time here is at an end. I am not meant to learn any more here; I am meant to return home and learn and grow more there. Like in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” when Aslan says: “This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” I have spent my season here, and now it is time for me to return to the world I am called into. Time to go and share what I have learned with friends and family back home.
“Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”- Mark 5:19
