The Lion's Voice in the Darkness

In C.S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy, young Shasta finds himself alone on a mountain pass in total darkness. He is exhausted, lost, and terrified. Then he realizes something is walking beside him — something large, something breathing. Every instinct tells him to run, but he cannot see where to flee. So he speaks into the darkness: "Who are you?"

The voice that answers belongs to Aslan. And Aslan reveals that He has been walking beside Shasta the entire journey — through every danger, every lonely stretch of road, every moment Shasta believed himself abandoned. The lion was never absent. He was simply unseen.

Courage is rarely the absence of fear. More often, it is the decision to speak into the darkness rather than flee from it. It is the trembling voice that asks, "Who are you?" when everything within us wants to stay silent and small.

The Psalmist understood this. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me." The shadow was real. The valley was real. But so was the Presence.

Perhaps courage begins not when we feel strong, but when we finally stop running long enough to hear the voice that has been beside us all along — the voice of the Almighty saying, "I was there the whole time."