The Time That Is Given Us

Deep in the Mines of Moria, surrounded by darkness and danger, Frodo Baggins confesses to Gandalf what so many of us have felt. "I wish it need not have happened in my time," the hobbit says of the burden he carries. Gandalf's reply in Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring is one of the wisest lines ever written: "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Frodo did not choose to be the Ring-bearer. He was small, ordinary, and utterly unqualified for the task. Yet Gandalf gently insists that the ring came to Frodo not by accident but by purpose — a purpose beyond anyone's full understanding.

How often we echo Frodo's complaint. We look at the challenges before us — the broken relationship, the difficult calling, the season we never asked for — and we say, "I wish this weren't mine to carry." But the God who numbers the hairs on our heads does not distribute assignments carelessly. Jeremiah learned this: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart."

You may feel as small and unlikely as a hobbit from the Shire. But the Almighty does not call the equipped — He equips the called. Your task today is not to wish for a different story. It is to be faithful in the one you have been given.