When the Shadow Is Only a Small and Passing Thing

In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King, there is a moment that has quietly ministered to readers for over seventy years. Sam Gamgee lies exhausted in the land of Mordor — a wasteland of ash and despair. The quest seems impossible. Frodo is broken. Evil appears to have swallowed the whole world. And then Sam looks up.

Through a gap in the clouds, he sees a single white star, and something shifts inside him. Tolkien writes that "the beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him." In that moment Sam realizes that no shadow, however vast, is permanent. Light and high beauty exist forever beyond the reach of darkness.

Tolkien, a devout Catholic who survived the trenches of the Somme, understood something about hope that comfortable people often miss — real hope is not the absence of suffering. It is a glimpse of something true breaking through when everything around you insists that nothing good remains.

The apostle Paul put it this way: "We do not lose heart. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all" (2 Corinthians 4:16-17).

When your Mordor feels endless, look up. The star was always there. The shadow was always the temporary thing.