When the cures ran out during my worst days of doctoring, I would pace a patient’s room, loathe the insufficiency of my hands, and yearn for Lucy Pevensie’s cordial. A heart tracing on a monitor would fatally spasm, my heart would lurch, and then my team and I would pitch into compressions and shocks, medications and needles.
When these measures proved futile and the room fell eerily silent, I’d stand with quavering hands, grieve, and the part of myself that dwells in stories would long to take up the cause of the young queen of Narnia, flitting between centaur and beaver with her crystal vial in hand.
Perhaps her elusive tincture could mend the ruptured cells and ravel the enzymes back into place when medicine failed. Perhaps I, too, could rush from husband to grandmother, from father to daughter, and with a drop of elixir restore color to their cheeks and shine to their eyes.
We all know this ache to heal what sin has decimated. Any parent who’s watched a child cry knows the desperation to repair a broken heart, to blot out the stinging words and to wipe away the tears. We watch the headlines scroll past on our screens, every word an outrage, and wonder how we can reassemble the pieces of a world so warped with corruption. With a pang in our chest, we yearn for that healing tonic, that tincture, to weld sundered hearts and knit the ragged edges of the wounds back together. Read More
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is available online at Project Gutenberg Canada. The link to the HTML edition of the book is http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-thelionthewitchandthewardrobe/lewiscs-thelionthewitchandthewardrobe-00-h.html An EPUB edition may also be downloaded from the same website. If you have never read the Narnia Chronicles, I strongly recommend that you start with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
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