A Star Above the Shadow

In The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien gives us one of literature's most quietly powerful portraits of faith. Sam Gamgee finds himself deep in the wasteland of Mordor, exhausted, hungry, carrying his friend Frodo toward a mountain that promises nothing but destruction. The darkness around them feels absolute and permanent.

Then Sam looks up. Through a break in the poisoned clouds, he sees a single white star. Tolkien writes that its beauty "smote his heart," and in that moment a thought pierced him "like a shaft, clear and cold" — that the Shadow was "only a small and passing thing" and that there was "light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Sam didn't escape Mordor in that moment. His circumstances didn't change at all. He still had miles of desolation ahead of him. But something shifted inside him because he caught a glimpse of something the darkness could not touch.

That is what faith does. It doesn't always remove the wilderness we're walking through. But it lifts our eyes long enough to see that the darkness around us is not the whole story. The Psalmist knew this when he wrote, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me."

The shadow is real. But the star is more real still. And the God who hung it there is faithful.