“When Digory took a minute to get his breath, and then went softly into his Mother’s room. And there she lay, as he had seen her lie so many other times, propped up on the pillows, with a thin, pale face that would make you cry to look at it. Digory took the Apple of Life out of his pocket.

And just as the Witch Jadis had looked different when you saw her in our world instead of in her own, so the fruit of that mountain garden looked different too. There were of course all sorts of colored things in the bedroom; the colored counterpane on the bed, the wallpaper. . . . But the moment Digory took the Apple out of his pocket, all those things seemed to have scarcely any color at all. Every one of them, even the sun- light, looked faded and dingy. . . . Nothing else was worth looking at: you couldn’t look at anything else. And the smell of the Apple of Youth was as if there was a window in the room that opened on Heaven.

‘Oh, darling, how lovely,’ said Digory’s Mother. ‘You will eat it, won’t you? Please,’ said Digory. ‘I don’t know what the Doctor would say,’ she answered. ‘But really—I almost feel as if I could.’ He peeled it and cut it up and gave it to her piece by piece. And no sooner had she finished it than she smiled and her head sank back on the pillow and she was asleep: a real, natural, gentle sleep, without any of those nasty drugs, which was, as Digory knew, the thing in the whole world that she wanted most. . . . He bent down and kissed her very softly and stole out of the room with a beating heart, taking the core of the apple with him. For the rest of that day, whenever he looked at the things about him, and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope; but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope” (C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew).

Lately, I’ve wished I could give that apple of youth to some people I know. I’ve read the story, so I know the apple couldn’t grant eternal life in our world, but it could — and did — work a little healing magic.

Unfortunately, there are no such apples. But the hope they represent is very much real. I’ve been around long enough to know that hope is a precious commodity. I also know it’s never too late to give up hope.

The beautiful part is that hope is not an ideal. It’s not an abstract concept. Hope is a person, and that person has a name — Jesus. And Jesus is very much still alive.

Jesus said that in this world we would have trouble. That’s not hard to see if you’re not wearing blinders. But He also said for us to take heart because He has overcome the world. He’s overcome everything His children will ever face that could ultimately destroy them.

Hope means that we survive. We might have scars, but we survive. Because Jesus bears His own scars, we can know healing and victory. Those scars are a testimony to Jesus overcoming the world. Our scars can be a testimony of how He brought us from who we used to be to who we are now to who we will one day be.

So we have hope.