Jerodmac's Thoughts on Stuff

Preparing for Unexpected Good
J.R.R. Tolkien
I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: The millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their "causes" and "effects." No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis*. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.
Excerpt from a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Christopher, 10 April 1944.
* "beneath the splendor of heaven"

~It's real easy to shrink back from the challenge of the advancing the kingdom of God when all you see around you is the advancing tide of 'evil'. In working with students, one might easily say, "It's no use; Teenagers are rebellious. I can't relate or make any difference at all." It sometimes feels as if what we do for Jesus' kingdom is 'enveloped in a dense dark vapour'. But that is only because we can only see from a veiled perspective. It would be ignorant to deny that evil is succeeding in our world today, but it would be equally as ignorant to give up, saying, "It's no use." My God is ultimately more powerful than anything else. He has conquered evil, and continues to conquer evil on a daily basis. There is another 'version' of the story of the world that I see around me: It's God's story and though the plot may be complicated and twisted, the climax has been already written.

I think that today I am going to try to look at things through that lens.