When the Mud Couldn't Put Out the Fire

In C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, there is a moment every believer should carry in their pocket. The Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum and his young companions have journeyed deep underground, where a cunning Witch throws enchanted powder on a fire and strums a mandolin, slowly convincing them that the sun, the sky, and Aslan himself are nothing but fantasies. The children begin to nod along. The underground world, she purrs, is the only world there is.

Then Puddleglum does something extraordinary. He stamps his bare webbed foot into the fire, and the pain breaks the spell. With his foot still smoking, he looks the Witch in the eye and declares that even if everything she claims is true — even if there is no sun, no Aslan, no Narnia — then the made-up world sounds like a far better place than hers, and he is going to live as a Narnian even if there isn't any Narnia.

That is faith. Not the absence of doubt, but the refusal to let doubt have the last word. Every honest believer has stood in that underground room. The world throws its enchantments — suffering, loss, the sheer silence of God — and whispers that none of it is real. Faith is the moment you stamp your foot on the fire and say, "I will trust what I have seen, not what the darkness is telling me now."

The Almighty does not ask us never to feel the spell. He asks us to keep walking toward the light we once saw clearly.