not all lions are evil

As we reach the end of The Horse and His Boy, Shasta received a stunning revelation about all of the lions he seemed to encounter along the journey for the North. “’I was the lion.’ And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the voice continued. ‘I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.’”[1] What Shasta thought was bad luck was actually the providence of the lion. When things didn’t make sense at the time, there was actually a greater plan at work that brought Shasta to the point in his life when he actually realized it. That’s very much like each one of us. We don’t always understand what is going on, and sometimes it is frightening. There are lions and other things around us that cause stress. Things seem to go wrong, and we don’t always see how these things could work out for good. We are very quick to assume that the lion is evil. Shasta was terrified of the lion, and he didn’t think that there was any way that it could have good intentions for him. He didn’t enjoy having the lion chase him on Bree for example, so he automatically assumed that the lion must have had bad intentions. He never even considered the possibility that not all trials are evil. Some trials are brought into our lives to help lead us to something better in the long run. They help develop our character perhaps in ways that we might not have been proved otherwise. They might keep it away from greater evils that we would have blindly wandered into if we hadn’t been diverted in a different direction. When we think about things going wrong, we automatically assume our perspective on wrong is the right one. By our own judgment, we know that we must understand everything perfectly, so if we believe that something is evil, it must actually be evil. This story reminds us that everything is not always as it seems. Yes, there is evil in the world that we bring upon ourselves by our own decisions. We use our free will in terrible ways to harm other people and even ourselves. However, not everything that is unpleasant is evil. It is like working out in the gym. People always say, “no pain, no gain.” I think our character is very similar. Not all trials are evil. Some can in fact help bring us to a better place that we could not have reached otherwise. [1] CS Lewis, “The Horse and His Boy” in The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection with Bonus Book: Boxen (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), Kindle Locations 5965-5969, Kindle Edition. Narnia, The Horse and His Boy, Shasta, Aslan, Lion, Trials, Evil Newer Older