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Think about how if you watch a scary movie you're subconsciously checking hallways, turning on extra lights, double checking that you locked doors, ect.... watching a ghost movie isn't going to summon something into your home, but you can freak yourself out and feel like something is there when it's not, because that's something brains do. So, yeah, your gut will lie to you. And that's just one example of how.

“Don’t hate on Edmund for betraying his siblings in LWW. The Turkish delight was enchanted, plus WW2 sugar rationing was a thing.”

All true, but reductionistic to the point of essentially missing one of the most crucial points of Edmund’s LWW story. Namely: Edmund is culpable.

Spurred on by the Witch’s lies and his own spite, Edmund betrays his family in exchange for enchanted candy and the promise of princedom. This is a crime so serious that Aslan must die to free Edmund of it.

And yes, “he betrayed his family for mediocre candy” sounds silly. It is silly! So are so, so many of the sins that we humans commit. We regularly betray kindness for status, truth for comfortable lies, integrity for money, and the God of the universe for idols. Is any of that, from a cosmic perspective, truly any less silly than selling out one’s family for Turkish delight?

Yet at the same time, it is reductionistic to discount the fact that the Turkish delight was enchanted. In universe, it is literally enchanted to make you want more of it, but I think that Lewis wrote it that way to make a broader point, one which is a bit more abstract. Sin is addictive. Once you have had a little, you will always want more (until and unless God changes your heart). This may be an explanation for many sin patterns, but it is not an excuse.  

LWW makes it very clear that there was spite in Edmund’s heart before the Witch got to him. Jadis, like Satan, saw Edmund’s predisposition towards sin and deceived him into believing that good was evil and evil good. Jadis is both deceiver and accuser, but Edmund’s heart was inherently spiteful, and the debt of his treachery could never be cleared with until Aslan died for him.

“Even a traitor may mend. I have known one who did.”

I know that the posts I keep seeing are meant to be a little tongue in cheek; I also think it’s important to point out that the sinner’s culpability is what gives grace its value. As Bonhoeffer wrote, “Costly grace […] is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.”

Also tongue-in-cheek, I know, but a lot of the posts I’ve seen point out that Lucy goes with Tumnus for tea and sardines, just as Edmund takes candy from the Witch. It’s the Pevensie MO to take food from strangers! There’s a deeper truth there as well. It could have been Lucy. When Lucy stumbled into Narnia for the first time, she could have met the Witch the way Edmund did, cold and alone and without knowing anything else about that world. Jadis could have been kind to Lucy, and tempted her with addictive food, and deceived her as well—perhaps preying not on spite and resentment, but rather on her feelings of inadequacy. Lucy could have gotten caught in sin just as Edmund was, and so could Susan or Peter. If that had been the case, Aslan would have shown them the same grace he showed Edmund.

(I do think that Edmund encountering the Witch and eating the Turkish delight was no accident; Aslan chose to justify and sanctify him specifically. But that’s another discussion.)

Pro-lifers are the only ones who care about the child before birth as well.

Organizations that help pregnant mothers and their preborn children are called pro-life charities.

Organizations that help children and their families after birth are called children’s charities.

And the thing is, when he came back to his studio, he’s not allowed to have crowds there either because of New York’s restrictions.

But without fail, every other joke, you can hear this one, single woman laughing in the background.

That’s his wife.

Covid restrictions don’t apply to his spouse, and everyone else in the studio has a job, and has to work, so she’s become the only person in the room left laughing at his jokes.

She doesn’t laugh every time. You can tell she’s not doing it on cue, because there are some bits she clearly likes better than others. Some bits where she is laughing her ass off, and some where she just chuckles.

But my god, every time she laughs, Colbert’s face lights up like the sun.

Like, even if every other person on earth was dead and gone, if he was on his deathbed and breathing his last breath, he’d still make a jokes, just to make her laugh again.

MULTIPLE people in my life have told me they can “tell” I’m “self conscious” because I look at my feet when I walk and they say it like they want me to open up about some social insecurities, like I have some wall they’re about to break down and we’ll have a moment

And I tell them the same truth every single time:

As a kid we had two MASSIVE Holly trees in the backyard and my dad and my uncle, both well meaning but perhaps poor planners, said “yes a great place for a swing set is directly beneath those.”

So they built it there and the issue is that entire section of yard was a Minefield of dried Holly leaves with one final mission before they became dirt which was to Stab themselves into a child’s foot

And being that my siblings and I had some feral rage aversion to wearing shoes, we took to running to the swings on our tiptoes, staring at the ground for the leaves

And to this DAY I still look at the ground when I walk out of habit formed by a decade of that

I’m playing with my hair because I have ADHD and can’t stay still.

“I can tell you’re lying because you’re looking up and to the side.”

I’m looking up and to the side because I have ADHD and can’t hear you if I’m looking directly at you.

“I can tell…”