Aslan's Country

So as cliche as it is to be one of the hundreds of people dusting off their set of the Chronicles of Narnia due to the release of the movie, I got the series for Christmas, and I just finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I don't quite know what it was about the ending (though I'll try to explain) but as the story drew to a close, God surprised, amazed, and delighted me so profoundly that I wept--purely and deeply--the sort of weeping that comes with a thousand indefinable emotions. I'm not going to quote anything because I don't know that the words from the page are really what did it, nor do I think this specific part will have a profound effect on everyone else. But something in those words reached down into the deepest part of me, and I knew it was God. Then the tears came, except they weren't really tears. One moment I was reading the fairy tale, then the next I gasped and the weeping began, full-force. It felt as though God intended me, Meredith Yvonne Cooper, to read those very words at that very moment, as if to say, "I hear your prayers, Beloved, and I know your deepest desires. Rest. I meet them." I was instantly humbled and broken. Who am I that God would speak to me so personally and so deeply?

It's moments like these that I wish I could capture and bottle to share with everyone else. This will have to do.