Friday, June 27

“Lo, I am with you always.”
—Matthew 28:20

At the end of Chapter Ten in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the Chronicles of Narnia, the little girl Lucy has agreed to enter the mysterious and frightening Magician’s House alone, walk upstairs to a certain room, and find a certain spell in the eerie Magician’s Book. Lucy has undertaken this task, which no one else is brave enough to do, in order to make the inhabitants of the island (who have been rendered unhappily invisible by magic) happily visible again. She locates the right spell at last, and carefully speaks it aloud, thereby (she discovers later) successfully undoing the initial disappearing spell.

To her great astonishment and delight, no sooner has she spoken the words than the great golden lion Aslan walks into the room. She runs to greet him and buries her face in his mane. Overjoyed to see him again after so long an absence, she asks him where he has been, where he has come from. “I have been here all the time,” Aslan replies, “but you have just made me visible.”

There is no magic by which we can make God appear to us—faith is not a conjuring trick, and Presence is pure gift from God, not something we can manipulate.

Nonetheless sometimes by grace we can realize as Jacob did (Genesis 28:16) that “surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” Like Jacob on his way from Beersheba to Haran, sometimes on our own journeys we too can dream true dreams of God’s love connecting heaven and earth, and can come to see on waking that God has been with us all along.

Our Risen Lord’s promise is sure: whether we realize it or not, he is with us always.

Invisible, immortal, eternal God, you are in all times and places, although we often fail to sense your presence. May we live by the vision of Jacob’s ladder, alive with angels coming and going, and by the light of the Resurrection, that we may trust that you are with us always.

The Signposts for June are written by Deborah Smith Douglas and originally appeared on explorefaith.org in May 2005.