The Wardrobe Door Nobody Believed Was Real

In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, young Lucy stumbles through a wardrobe into the magical land of Narnia. When she returns and tells her siblings, they don't believe her. Peter and Susan think she's making it up. Edmund, who later enters Narnia himself, deliberately lies and says she's only pretending. Lucy is left standing alone with a truth no one else will accept.

What strikes me every time I read that scene is Lucy's quiet stubbornness. She doesn't shout. She doesn't manufacture evidence. She simply refuses to deny what she has experienced. When the wise Professor Kirke is finally consulted, he asks a devastating question: "Does your experience lead you to regard your sister as a liar?"

Faith often feels like Lucy's position. You have encountered something real — a moment of answered prayer, a peace that arrived when it had no business arriving, a still small voice in the wreckage of your worst night — and the world looks at you the way Peter and Susan looked at Lucy. With pity. With suspicion.

But here is what Lewis understood, because he lived it himself as a reluctant convert dragged kicking into the Kingdom: faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is Lucy walking back to the wardrobe one more time, pressing her hand against the fur coats, and stepping forward anyway.

The Almighty does not ask you to argue anyone into belief. He asks you to keep walking toward what you know is true.