Don’t Curse the Darkness, Conquer It
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 want to 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 has happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer. I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t.
They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.
Samwise Gamgee, Lord of the Rings
Yesterday, I attended a memorial service for a friend’s wife, who died suddenly from a rare brain disease.
While there, I reconnected with another friend who is caring for her mother who is suffering from vascular dementia.
And you, my friend, are dealing with struggles of your own.
Sometimes you feel like giving up, but you keep on going.
It feels as if the darkness is spreading.
Is it spreading, or are we simply paying more attention to it?
There’s a lot of good in this world of ours.
And it is definitely worth fighting for.
But how do we fight the darkness?
The temptation is to fight it with more darkness.
When we give in to that temptation, we are making the problem worse.
The only effective way to fight is with kindness, generosity, and goodness.
It often feels as if we are not making progress.
But once we begin putting goodness into the world, we discover that we are not the only ones fighting this fight.
Then we notice there is more good in the world than we believed.
And there is a compounding effect.
Every act of kindness reverberates and seems to generate even more kindness.
When we perform acts of generosity, we not only bless others, but we also enrich ourselves.
Today’s mission is to seek out the good around us and to magnify it.
And when we encounter the darkness, we will conquer it with kindness, generosity, and goodness.
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