“The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.

“Welcome, child,” he said.
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
–Excerpt from “Prince Caspian” CS Lewis

Many people use the illustration of an onion to describe how you can peel back layer after layer and eventually reach the core of the person or matter. Most of the time I think it gets used to explain someone who may have more brokenness and compensations than wholesome complexity, but I suppose that’s a matter for another time. I’d like to take that picture and work it exactly backwards, from the inside out.

Let’s start at the smallest part of the onion, the core, and suppose that it is your view of God at present. You can see that much of Who He is, how He interacts with the world, and what He has done with your life. It’s all you see right now. Then God takes you through a season of growth or reveals a particular insight, and suddenly you see that there is a layer OUTSIDE of the one you knew. The onion is bigger! This ring is a whole new experience. You see something about God you didn’t see before. You see the world through a new lens. God just got bigger to you. He was really that size all the time, but some part of Him that was invisible became visible, just as you moved outside of the center of the onion and saw there was another ring.

It is a marvel to me to think that when I look at the world around me, as I walk through my day, there are rings upon rings of the onion that I haven’t seen yet. There are facets of God’s character that are invisible to me now, but they are there. They are around me. He is functioning entirely true to Himself, whether I am big enough to see Him or not.

I love the picture as Lewis paints it with Aslan. The lion did not grow, but because Lucy did, he seemed bigger to her. Our God will never lose that capacity to grow bigger every time we do. It is an amazing thing.

May you NEVER lose the hunger to see the ring outside the one you know.