Puddleglum's Barefoot Defiance

In C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, four travelers find themselves trapped underground, where a witch weaves an enchantment to make them forget everything they have ever known. With a sweet-smelling fire and a hypnotic hum, she slowly persuades them that there is no sun, no Overworld, no great lion named Aslan. The surface world, she insists, is nothing but a children's fantasy.

One by one, they begin to surrender. Their memories blur. The Overworld starts to feel like a dream. Then Puddleglum, a gangly, pessimistic Marsh-wiggle, does the last thing anyone expects. He stamps out the enchanted fire with his bare foot. The pain clears his head, and with the smell of burnt flesh filling the room, he speaks.

"Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world," he tells the witch. "Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one." He admits he cannot prove the sun exists or that Aslan is real. But he declares he will live as a Narnian even if there is no Narnia — because the world he believes in is better than anything she has to offer.

Faith often works like that. Not every question gets answered. Not every doubt gets resolved. There are seasons when the Enemy throws a fog over everything you once knew to be true, and the life of faith starts to feel like something you imagined. But the God who called you out of darkness is not diminished by your foggy seasons. Sometimes faith is simply stamping out the fire that numbs you and saying, "I'm going to live as though the Lord is real — because He is, and His world licks this one hollow."