What I'm Trying to Decide to Do
I’ve been re-reading J. R. R. Tolkein’s remarkable book, The Fellowship of the Ring.
“Why read a book you already have read?” someone asked me when I mentioned it. Some books are, of course, worth only one read-through (some not even that). But others, and Tolkein’s among them, draw me back again and again.
A scene from early in the book (the first part of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings) strikes me now. Frodo, a hobbit, the main character, finds himself uprooted from his quiet, calm life in the Shire. A resurgence of evil in the world has meant a new calling for him fraught with difficulty, a vocation pressed upon him.
At one point, as Frodo counts the cost and realizes the potential perils of the journey he has to undertake, he confides in Gandalf, the sage figure who has more-than-natural wisdom.
“I wish,” Frodo says of the disruption, “it need not have happened in my time.”
"So do I," said Gandalf, "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.”
I think of that now, in this era when a virus makes what Gandalf goes on to say all the more relevant: “The Enemy is fast becoming very strong. We shall be hard put to it.”
Today I learned of someone who succumbed to the pandemic upon us, a former lay leader at a church I served, the first person I know personally to die of COVID-19. It made the hardship we face more at hand.
Wish as we might for less worrisome and troubling days, I am working on Gandalf’s question: Not, as I’m sometimes tempted to entertain, a question like “Why?” or “Why now?” but what Gandalf said to Frodo: “What will we decide to do with the time that is given us?”
I worry about being glib, knowing it’s possible to be shallow or deny people’s (or my own) pain, but still I wonder how I can focus on the work given me to do during this crazy time. “We shall be hard put to it,” to be sure. But what are the less-obvious blessings right at hand, close by? And how can I, reaching beyond myself, stay alert to the needs and sorrows of those I could minister to?
Most of us would not have thought at beginning of this year that a pandemic would assail us—disrupting our daily lives, crashing our economy, shutting down schools, leaving us isolated and distanced--not even able to show up at church! What happens in our day and time will change us. We cannot decide our way out of the challenges, wistfully wishing for another age in which to live. But we can choose to try to live and love fully in this charged moment. That much I can, at my better moments, decide.