The Wisdom of Hobbits

A special dedication tonight

To Brian, my best friend and faithful companion there and back again.

And to everyone in the middle of their story.

Tonight I’m thinking about a different book. I may be going a little bit nutty, but it does seem like God has been answering my prayers tonight with LOTR movie quotes and it feels, quite eerily, like I’m having a conversation with a little hobbit whose spirits are hard to dampen.  

I, like Frodo before me, am having a good wrestle with some truth, even though, deep down, I know the fight is useless and truth will win every time, I doesn’t feel that way right now. So I’m sitting here feeling rather sorry for myself in my current predicament. I’m wishing very much that my abnormal life could at least appear normal so I could pretend it was normal. The weight of circumstances, like that of an evil ring that doesn’t want to be thrown into a volcano, is growing with each passing day.  I’ve reached what seems like the breaking point. I don’t want to keep going. I’m scared and miserable, despite what I know to be true, despite what I know needs to be done. And I guess I’m, in a way, getting a pep-talk from a fictional Hobbit. This particular pep-talk comes from the end of the Two Towers (I honestly don’t remember if it’s in the book, so I’m quoting the movie. If you think that makes me a Tolkienian poser, please also consider that while I have read the trilogy three times, I have seen the movies three or four dozen times. Also, please don’t calculate how much time that means I have roughly spent watching those films. I did, and it was rather depressing, but I digress).

For the purpose of illustration, and for fun, I have decided to dictate how that conversation is going, and it goes something like this…

 “I can’t do this, Sam,” I groan and curl up into a tighter little ball, resisting the urge to cry but not the one to pout.

“I know,” he says, empathetically. “By rights, we shouldn’t even be here, but we are.”

“I’ve been carrying this around for too long. Something has got to give. I have done my best, done what I was told to do.  Why can’t it just get easier instead of harder?!”

He considers this a moment, and then perks up like he has a bit of wisdom to share. “It’s like the old stories, the ones that really mattered.”

I immediately picture Joseph at the bottom of a pit, listening to his brothers negotiating his price, a throng of a hundred thousand people coming the Red Sea, knowing they need to cross and they don’t know how that could possibly happen. I see Sarah placing her hand on her belly watching all the young women play with their children and wondering if God’s promise would actually come true.

“Full of darkness and danger, they were,” He continues. “And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?”

“It can’t!” I interrupt, frustrated. “It can’t go back to the way it was because even if it was as fine and dandy as it used to be, I can’t ignore the things that I now know were wrong and that I need to change.”

Sam nods, understanding, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.”

I want to protest, but I know it’s true. I know that even if circumstances don’t change, there is a better life to come. I don’t want to say it, because hope seems like too dangerous a word tonight. But I listen because it’s what I need to hear.

“Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.”

This sounds a little too bright and perky for this hour, but I can’t argue with it.

“Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.”

I know what I need to do. Even if my tale of faith won’t make it into canonized scripture to be read by billions throughout the generations, I know it still means something, and it still matters, and I’m still relying on the same God who came through for all the others time and time again.

“Folk in those stories,” Sam says, as if he’s talking about me now, “had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

I think about what I’m holding onto. It’s more than "there is good in this world it's worth fighting for". It’s that God exists outside of the norm, outside of our human experience, outside of what is commonplace and expected. He’s called me out of those things and into the world of faith, and even if it’s messy and painful and exhausting, it’s where I am. It’s where I should be, and somehow, it’s better than anywhere else I could be.

This is going to pass. Somehow. The story will mean something. Eventually. It’s not going to change tonight. It may take years like it did for Sarah to have the child God promised her and like it did as Joseph went from slave to prisoner to second in command of all Egypt. It may take a form I would never have thought possible, like it did for those people who watched the water split apart and walked on the bottom of the sea. If this is where God has me, then I need to stop trying to fit into normal. I need to stop longing for my cozy little Hobbit hole and tea cake. I can’t be ashamed anymore of what faith looks like to everyone else. If there is going to be a story here, it needs to be told because it means something, even if I’m still entirely "too small to understand why".