Chewing on granola, magazine by my side, I glanced up–through the windowed doors, beyond my small garden and above my helplessly leaning bamboo fence–and saw it.

The lamp post.

I hadn’t noticed it before. Tall, dark, stately. In the morning light, it seemed to smile back at me, beckoning. I’ve lived in France eight months now and I never noticed our lamp post. I smile to think that the Lord revealed its existence until just today. Life with Jesus is like that–one huge adventure, where at times He closes our eyes to truth, only to reveal it in technicolor at just the right moment.

So, I thought about the lamp post. And I remembered Narnia. The lamp post signaled the paper thin divide between reality and true reality, between mundane life and the matrix on the other side. One side of the lamp post, Aslan was a shadow, a vapor, a rumor. The other side, He is alive–living wild and fierce and beautiful.

I wonder how many of us stay this side of the lamp post where life is safe and God is definable. Where we vex ourselves with triviality, forgetting about eternity and the reality of God who intersects lives. The lamp post beyond my leaning fence reminds me to venture onward and upward, beyond life’s everydayness, toward the Lion indefinable.

There is beauty on the other side of the lamp post, but there is also risk. There is unknown. But to live in light of Aslan’s reality is to live life fully alive, fully alert to His voice, His singing, His whispers.

I want to live near Narnia–in my heart and in my actions. How about you?