165 - C.S. Lewis's Paradox: Taking The Next Right Road

Have you ever known — actually known — that you were on the wrong road, but kept walking anyway? I've done that literally, driving lost and just deciding to see where it goes. But I've done it with my life too: moving forward, making real progress by every visible measure, while some part of me sensed I wasn't heading in the right direction at all. This episode is about that particular kind of faithfulness — the one that looks like turning around.

C.S. Lewis's Paradox In Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that progress means getting nearer to where you actually want to be — and if you're on the wrong road, going forward just gets you further away, faster. "The man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." Our culture treats turning back as failure and pressing on as virtue; Lewis says the opposite is often true. Refusing to turn back when you know you're wrong isn't determination — it's being stuck and dressing it up as strength.

A Wrong Road I Was On I was pushing hard toward graduate school and a career as a professor — a full ride, years of undergraduate work invested. Then I became a Christian at 22, and it suddenly struck me: I was going the wrong direction, even though that direction looked appealing and I'd already invested so much in it.

The Silver Chair's Four Signs In C.S. Lewis's Narnia story, Aslan sends Jill and Eustace on a quest with four signs to remember, warning that things won't look the same once they're down in Narnia. They walk past the first sign, miss the second, and cross straight over the third without recognizing it. The turning point isn't a clever forward move — it's their companion Puddleglum stopping everyone and forcing them to say out loud: we missed it, we have to go back.

Pharaoh and Jonah: Two Ways of Seeing the Sign Pharaoh doesn't miss the ten plagues — they're unmissable, one after another. He sees clearly and chooses to keep walking anyway, hardening his heart every time. Jonah is the mirror image: he reads God's instruction perfectly, understands it completely, and runs the opposite direction on purpose. But Jonah's story doesn't end on the boat — after the storm and the fish, he does the one thing Pharaoh never does. He turns around.

The Prodigal Son, Found The son who took every wrong turn available, spent everything, and ended up feeding pigs finally comes to his senses and heads home. What he gets isn't a lecture or a probationary period — his father was already scanning the horizon for him. Turning back wasn't the humiliating part of the story. It was the part where he gets found.

Three small steps for the road you're actually on: name one road, honestly, that you've kept pressing forward on even though you've known for a while it's the wrong direction. Ask yourself what's driving that — is it pride like Pharaoh's, watching the signs and staying the course anyway? And let the turning back be met the way the prodigal son was met — not with shame, not with a fresh set of hoops to run through, but simply as coming home.

If you want to sit with this more: Lewis makes the direct argument in Mere Christianity, tells the full story in The Silver Chair, and Luke 15 gives you the ending all of this points toward.

I'm Jill from the Northwoods. Find everything at jillfromthenorthwoods.com.

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