As the story opens, Aslan gives Jill four specific signs to remember and follow. These are instructions that will guide her and Eustace on their quest to find the lost Prince Rilian. Aslan is emphatic about how she is to treat these signs. She must repeat them to herself morning and evening. She must keep them in mind always. And she must not let anything distract her from them.
Almost immediately, things begin to slip. Jill is taken in by the breathtaking view of Narnia from the cliffs. She misses the first sign as she fails to recognize Caspian on the shore. From there, she gradually begins to forget. As she is introduced to the giants’ castle at Harfang, all she can think about is a warm bed and comforting food. The signs are pushed further from her mind. The children stop reciting them. They stop consulting them. By the time they find themselves deep underground in the Underland, they are navigating almost entirely by their own instincts and the pressures of their circumstances.
Lewis is pointing us to a simple truth in this story. The forgetting is not dramatic or immediate. It is gradual. It is a result of distraction. They don’t reject the signs. They just stop attending to them.
This dynamic is often true for us, for churches, for ministries. How often do we allow the busyness of life, the comfort of routine, the pull of culture, the noise of politics, or the weight of circumstances to crowd out our regular, attentive time in God’s Word? It is not that we reject Scripture. We simply stop attending to it. The writer of Hebrews warns us:
(Hebrews 2:1 NIV) We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.
Drifting rarely happens all at once. It happens like it does for Jill. It is gradual, almost imperceptible, one distraction at a time.
But the story does not end there. The children are turned around at their lowest point. They are cold and held captive. It is there, looking down at the floor of a ruined city, that they read the sign. It is carved into the stone beneath their feet. It is not until it is right in front of them that they recognize their failure.
We don’t have to wait for that moment. The invitation is always open for us to return to the signs, to open Scripture again with fresh eyes. We are invited to let it speak into our lives. Whatever season we find ourselves in, the signs are still there. The question is whether we are paying attention.
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