The Thread She Could Not See

In George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, young Princess Irene discovers her mysterious great-great-grandmother living in a hidden tower room, spinning at a wheel. The grandmother gives Irene a gift — a thread so fine it is invisible to ordinary sight. She ties one end to a ring on Irene's finger and tells her that whenever she is lost or afraid, she need only follow where the thread leads.

The moment comes when Irene must rescue her friend Curdie from the goblin mines beneath the mountain. The thread pulls her forward — not along well-lit corridors, but straight into darkness, through a heap of stones, and even into a pool of cold water. Every step feels wrong. Everything her senses tell her screams to turn back. But she follows the thread.

When she finds Curdie and tells him she is following a thread from her grandmother, he cannot see it. He thinks she is imagining things. Yet the thread leads them both safely out of the mountain.

MacDonald, who profoundly influenced C.S. Lewis, understood something about faith that many of us forget: it does not ask us to see the whole path. It asks us to trust the hand that holds the other end. The writer of Hebrews said it plainly — faith is "the evidence of things not seen." Sometimes the thread leads through water, through stone, through everything that seems impossible. But the One who spun it knows exactly where it goes.