The Marsh-wiggle's Bare Foot

In C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, three travelers find themselves trapped underground with the Queen of Underland. She lights an enchanted fire, fills the room with sweet smoke, and begins strumming a silver instrument. Slowly, hypnotically, she convinces them that there is no sun, no Narnia, no Aslan — that the world above is nothing but a children's dream.

And it almost works. One by one, their resolve crumbles. The children begin nodding along. The truth they once knew starts dissolving like morning fog.

Then Puddleglum — a gangly, pessimistic Marsh-wiggle nobody would mistake for a hero — does something extraordinary. He stamps his bare foot directly into the enchanted fire. The pain breaks the spell. And with his foot still smoking, he looks at the witch and says something remarkable: even if everything she says is true, even if there is no Aslan and no world above, "the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

That is courage — not the absence of doubt, but the refusal to surrender to it.

Every believer knows what that underground room feels like. The world has its own enchantments — voices that whisper your faith is foolish, your hope naive, your God imaginary. Courage is not pretending those voices don't exist. Courage is stamping your foot on the fire and declaring, "I still believe."

The Almighty never promised the smoke would clear before you had to choose. He promised He would be there when you did.