Last week I got away for a couple hours to see the new Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. I wasn’t sure how they would make a good movie out of it, but I really enjoyed it. This book has some of the more vivid spiritual metaphors of the whole Narnia series and I liked how some of those were portrayed. The only thing I thought was sold a little short was the scene where Eustace is restored/changed by Aslan. I thought it was done too quickly and too simply to allow the significance of that moment to sink in. I thought Eustace was a little rough too as far as actors go.
But there were many moments I wasn’t expecting that were very enjoyable. Perhaps the one that left its mark the most on me involved Lucy. The movie draws out much more the theme of comparison in Lucy, more than the book emphasizes even.
At one point Lucy wishes to be beautiful like her sister and she is quickly given a vision of what that really means – a world in which she doesn’t exist. She freaks out a bit and that’s when she encounters Aslan. They talk and Aslan explains what Lucy has done and tells her,
“By wishing to be like someone else, you wished yourself away.”
I’ve spent a lot of the last couple months in discussions about identity and identity formation as it relates to leadership development, so this spoke powerfully. We so often look at other people to set the bar for what we should be or what we should do. If we’ve grown up marginalized in some capacity (ethnicity, race, gender, personality, strengths…), the temptation to assimilate and be “like” the majority or accepted is exceedingly great.
What a powerful statement that we can in so many ways “wish ourselves away” in order to experience acceptance and fit in. The movie I think powerfully reinforces the beauty of uniqueness and the need to be who we are and we we were made to be and not try to be someone else or someone else’s picture of who we should be.
As I think about leadership development this has significant relevance as well. So often leadership development can focus on shaping people into what the organization or church or ministry wants them to be so that they can fulfill its stated vision and mission. Yet such efforts often create dynamics that generate feelings of inferiority and inadequacy rather than security and empowerment.
What does it look like to you to help young leaders (or anyone!) settle into who they are rather than unknowingly or unintentionally allowing them to wish themselves away as they strive to find their place?
