When the Marsh-Wiggle Stomped the Fire

In C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, there is a scene that has stayed with me for years. The children and their companion Puddleglum, a gangly Marsh-wiggle, have traveled deep underground to rescue a prince held captive by an enchantress. When they finally confront her, she does not draw a sword. She lights a fire of sweet-smelling powder and begins to strum a mandolin, speaking in a low, hypnotic voice. There is no sun, she tells them. There is no Narnia. There is no Aslan. Everything they believe in is just a made-up game, a children's fantasy built from the only real things in this dark, underground world.

And it almost works. The children begin to nod. Their memories grow dim. The world above starts to feel like a half-remembered dream.

Then Puddleglum does something unexpected. He stamps his bare foot directly into the enchantress's fire. The pain clears his head, and he speaks one of the most remarkable confessions of faith in all of literature. Even if everything you say is true, he tells her, the made-up world sounds like a far better place than your real one, and I am going to live as a Narnian even if there is no Narnia.

That is what faith looks like under pressure — not a feeling that sweeps you along, but a deliberate, sometimes painful decision to stand on what you know to be true when every voice around you says otherwise. The Almighty does not ask us to believe because it is easy. He asks us to trust Him precisely when the fire burns low and the enchantment grows thick.