These Evil Days

“Alas, that these evil days should be mine.”

If you’ve ever seen “The Lord of the Rings,” you might recognize this quote from “The Two Towers.” The words are spoken by King Theoden at the grave of his only son and heir, as Theoden contemplates the coming war for Middle Earth, a war which has already claimed the life of his son, a war he wants no part of, a war that seems utterly hopeless and unwinnable.

These evil days.

You don’t have to be a fantasy enthusiast or even a Tolkien fan to identify with Theoden here. We have all experienced this same feeling of despair, perhaps increasingly in this age of technology and social media, when the ills of the whole world — violence, injustice, moral disorder and chaos — are in our faces, on our phones, looming over our days.

But when we despair like this, we forget an important truth: this is the time of fulfillment, and we are lucky enough to be living through it.

Yes, the world is broken. It was broken two thousand years ago, too, when Jesus stood up in the synagogue on the Sabbath and read the words of the prophet Isaiah: “He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives…and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

Jesus didn’t come to fix the brokenness of the world. He came to fix our brokenness. He offers us not relief from the trials of life, but an answer to the question of how to live in joy, in love and in purpose in the midst of these evil days.

©LPi