I Am The Lion

I Am the Lion

I never used to be afraid. I’ve lived alone in a big city my entire adult life, traveled halfway across the world and back by myself, started a business from nothing with no safety net, skydived from thirteen thousand feet, and stepped up to speak in front of perfect strangers more times than I can count. For as long as I can remember, I’ve leaped first and panicked later.

But now I’ve begun to worry about the ordinary things that keep a person up at night (deadlines, illness, finances) and other, unknown things that seem to lurk about the edges of my consciousness. I’m more aware of evil than I’ve ever been, more uncertain about the future than I’d like. I am not fearless anymore.

Events of any given day can cause a tightening in my chest and a desperate feeling of anxiety. One reminded me of a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. Shasta, the protagonist, feels something following him. Frightened, he finally asks, “Who are you?” The presence answers, “One who has waited long for you to speak.” When the presence invites him to share his sorrows, Shasta describes how he ran away and was chased by lions, how he swam for his life and then was chased by another lion in the desert. “Don’t you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?” he asks.

His companion answers, “There was only one lion.” When Shasta questions this, his companion says, “I was the lion.”^a In every instance Shasta had felt fear, a lion had been near—not hunting him, but protecting him.

A lion sleeps beside my bed. Nothing can touch me when he is near. He guards my sleep and has shadowed me through every waking trial and victory of life. He is terrible and beautiful and full of light—and his very breath makes every other fear seem small.

One of the elders said to me, “Stop weeping; behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome so as to open the book and its seven seals.”

Revelation 5:5, NASB

^a C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 163–64.