It’s been a while since I’ve written something for this blog. A week of midterms followed by a week of Spring Break and then followed by a week of quarantine has made this week memorable and unique all the same.
When I left for Oklahoma to be a part of Campus Christian Fellowship’s service week over Spring Break, I did not expect to have the world inundated with a panic over a global pandemic during my absence. I did not expect universities across the nation to shift all of their coursework online over a matter of days. But most of all, I did not anticipate such an unexpected Sabbath.
In many ways, it feels as though the world has stopped spinning. What used to be such a vibrant and non-stop machine seems to have come to a grinding halt. Stories of self-quarantine have resounded across social media. Tales of panic and craziness have appeared. All in all, for lack of a better phrase, it has just been an insane week. My family is a big fan of board games, and I feel as though my sister described it the best: “It’s like we’re living inside the board game Pandemic, and we’re just waiting for an outbreak to start in our city.”
But in the midst of it all, in the middle of me packing up my things for an unexpected week at home, while universities close their campus and friends scramble to figure out living arrangements, I’ve actually found a weirdly strong sense of peace. Maybe it’s because I have the blessing of a quarantine with a loving family, out in the sweeping hills of the Ozarks where any threat of virus and illness seems a long and far way away. Maybe it’s the peace of God descending upon my life. I prefer to think the latter, although I admit it may be the former.
In this time of craziness and frenzied living, I’ve started to try to think of this period of uncertainty as a practice in faith, patience, and sabbath. I believe that all of the turbulent and wild things happening can act as a great reminder to slow down and remind ourselves of the True things that are here in the midst of everything. The panic sweeping the world does not change who God is, nor does it change how he acts in relation to his children. The hysteria of the world does not change God’s call for us to slow down and to Sabbath.
Sabbath itself is something that I have written about previously on this website, and so I don’t think it really necessary that I dive into that topic (although I highly recommend checking out these posts for more on Sabbath!). So instead of writing on the Sabbath, I’ll write on something that has been coming to mind a lot more in the recent days: Tolkien. In The Return of the King, the third part to The Lord of the Rings, this wonderful passage appears:
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
j.r.r. Tolkien, The Return of the king
When you are surrounded by darkness, in the middle of the night, it is easy to forget that the night is but a passing thing. This passage has been popping up in my mind more and more over the last couple of days. Even as I sit now in the warm sunshine enjoying the creation of God in my own extended Sabbath, it is easy to forget the blessings that have been given and only remember the darkness that used to encompass us. Andrew Peterson (a fantastic artist that I plan on getting around to doing a Christian Creatives for) has a song from his 2015 album The Burning Edge of Dawn that really encapsulates this idea.
While the whole song is quite excellent and worth a full listening to, there are a couple of sections that have been reverberating around my head alongside that Tolkien passage that I’d like to highlight. Here are those lyrics:
I've been waiting for the sun To come blazing up out of the night like a bullet from a gun Till every shadow is scattered, every dragon's on the run Oh, I believe, I believe that the light is gonna come And this is the dark, this is the dark before the dawn ... So I'm waiting for the King To come galloping out of the clouds while the angel armies sing He's gonna gather His people in the shadow of His wings And I'm gonna raise my voice with the song of the redeemed 'Cause all this darkness is a small and passing thing
While this song does take a certain Messianic angle (as I believe it rightly should), I believe it can be applied to our time now just as well. We need that reminder. In the midst of pain and darkness, joy will come. The light will shine and it will shine out the clearer. In the end, there is still one Truth above all other things in this world.
All this darkness is but a small and a passing thing.
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