The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of Insecurities: rachael gilbert

Confession time: I am secretly Gollum. I mean, the jokes on you, because it should have been obvious: I talk to myself, I’m short, my posture is terrible, I given up on the whole “caring about my appearance” thing and my life’s goal is to steal back something that was taken from me (in my case it’s a sweater my sister stole when she went off to college and not an all-powerful ring but watevs). And so for this week’s blog post I was really hoping to find a quote from Gollum I could use, but spoiler alert: Gollum never really says anything profound. He’s just kinda creepy (I mean, sammmmmeeee). So for about a week I gave up.

But then my dad, with his terrible tyrannical rule, asked me to clean my room. And in the midst of grumbling over the unfairness of it all and half-heartedly throwing things across the room, I came across a piece of paper. It was crumbled up in the back of the bottom drawer of my desk, obviously put there for a reason and then forgotten. When I unrumpled it I remembered a LOTR themed retreat for my church camp, Burnamwood, that I’d gone to in seventh grade (yes, it is just as nerdy as it sounds) and a piece of advice from a small, chubby hobbit who is somehow always hungry that I’d held onto. It reads something like this:

“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t 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 the darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will 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 that I do understand now. Folk in those stories has lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something; that there’s good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”

And sure, those words were meant for Frodo Baggins, who was burdened with a glorious purpose but had somehow lost his way in the struggle. They were meant to be recited in the heart of Mordor when all hope was lost. But we’ve all been through stuff we don’t want to talk about. The regrets or fears you only think about late at night. Moments in our lives where everything was just wrong and we couldn’t do a thing about it. And I think Samwise Gamgee does a good job explaining why we keep going. Because someday far into the future, that moment, that darkness, will just be a story. A memory to resurface late at night or a moment to relive at family gatherings. The time in which we live, the here and now, will be difficult. Things will fall apart. Hope will be taken. Love will be lost. And that’s okay. It’s okay not to know where the hell you’re going or what you’re doing. Or how anything will ever be the same. That’s a part of the (to be pretentious) human condition. And whether your struggle be with family members or with a part of yourself or some other shadow, it will pass. And a new day will be upon us. Sam, I think, also does a good job of reminding us that that “new day” isn’t going to be some Gastbian “one fine morning” when you wake up one day and everything is okay again. It’s going to take months, years, decades to come across that “new day”.  But it will come.