To help encourage you today in your Christian mission, I have a little story for you -- one taken from JRR Tolkien’s masterful Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now, as a Baptist preacher, I’m usually using a different text for public exhortations, but I don’t think you’ll mind if I use this one today. The scene I’m drawing to your attention comes from the last book in the trilogy. The brave hobbits Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee are struggling through Mordor on their way to Mt. Doom and, in this terrible moment when Frodo is nearly overcome with despair, fatigue, and dread, he turns to his dear friend and moans, “I can’t do this, Sam.”
At which Sam Gamgee, one of the most wonderfully heroic characters in all literature, responds, “I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness, and danger, they were. 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?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
Frodo then asks, “What are we holding on to, Sam?”
The answer? “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo…and it’s worth fighting for.”
My friends, we have things good and worth fighting for too – the biblical ideals of truth, justice, and the sanctity of human life. So the decision of these two characters must be, in real life, our decisions too. Oh yes; we have a God-given opportunity to be heroes just like Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin, Aragorn and Gandalf, and all the rest of that noble fellowship of the ring. We too must carry on with our part in the adventure story God has written us into. True enough, it’s a story that has real danger, real enemies, and real sacrifices. And yet it has spiritual rewards that are unimaginably rich and fully deserving of our boldest efforts.
So, what do you say? Let’s get after it!
