Asleep in the Light

He turned Shadowfax off the Road, and the great horse leaped the green dike that here ran beside it; and then at a cry from Gandalf he was gone, racing towards the Barrow-downs like a wind from the North.
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"Well, here we are, just the four of us that started out together," said Merry. "We have left all the rest behind, one after another. It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded."

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"Not to me," said Frodo. "To me it feels more like falling asleep again."

(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King).

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There is a powerfully poignant, yet subtle, scene near the end of the film adaptation of Tolkien's epic myth The Lord of the Rings. Four simple, unadventurous hobbits have been uprooted from their quiet, peaceful, provincial lives and thrust into the very eye of the storm of the greatest and most terrible battle of their Age. A quest of ultimate importance, one that holds the key to sudden victory or utter defeat, seems to have fallen upon these four simple creatures from the Shire. Deadly danger hounds their every step as they fly from one peril to another, darkness gathers, and hope wanes. Eventually these otherwise pleasure-seeking hobbits grow tough from living and sleeping out of doors in all conditions, even as they grow thin from the sparse fare available along the adventurer's Road. Their countenances grow grim and fell, much like the faces of those princes and lords of Men, Elves, and Dwarves with whom they must journey if they are to fulfill their quest. They learn to carry weapons and are forced to learn to wield them, lest they perish unmourned and their bones bleach in the Wild hundreds of leagues from hearth and home. And then, at the moment of uttermost despair when all seems to have been in vain, the Quest is achieved: Darkness is defeated and the World is saved.

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And now, thirteen months from the day they fled the Shire and undertook the great Quest of their lives, the four friends return home at last. And then comes the scene from the movie that we mentioned earlier. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin sit across from each other at a low table in their favorite ale-house, The Green Dragon, staring with blank expressions into their mugs of ale. The silence is heavy, and it is powerful. Home at last, safe and sound. Life back to the way it always was before the adventure began.

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But something has changed.

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Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have changed.

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And the question in their blank, expressionless stares is clear: After an adventure like that, how does one go back to living a "normal life"?

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Not because you can't go back, but because who would want to?

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Put into terms that we are all perhaps familiar with, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have been "spoiled for the ordinary". If G.K. Chesterton is right, if "Romance is the deepest thing in life...deeper even than reality", and if this Romance is defined as the deep longing of the heart to be bound in deep fellowship with those we love best in all the world in an adventure or quest of heroic proportions - well, who could genuinely expect Frodo and the others to not be devastated and heartbroken at the realization that there great adventure had come to an end? (You'll notice that most movies of high adventure end before this next scene, saving viewers from having to participate in this post-adventure depression...this return to "ordinary life"...this "falling asleep again". But despite their considerate movie-making, you experience the let-down all the same. It hits you the moment you step out the doors of the theatre and into a crowded parking lot: the end of the adventure and the return to "ordinary life".)

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And what of us? We have all lived through certain phases of our journey that have been marked by excitement, adventure, a sense that a destiny and a call is upon or lives, that we are taking part in a Quest of eternal significance in our own lives and in the lives of those to whom we have been sent.

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Yes, we have all, for the most part, had those moments.

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But what about now? What about today? How many of you find yourselves in that place of dramatic adventure in this moment? And if you don't, how are you living on the backside of your adventure? Have you let the memory of those exciting times fade away, treating them as if they all were merely the wild dreams of youth that inevitably had to give way to the harsh realities of responsible adulthood? Or, like Frodo, are you vitally aware that the adventure was the waking reality, and that this thing that we call "normal" life is little more than a sleep-walk through the most important years of our earthly existence?

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Yes, our lives are fairly comfortable at the moment. We have all that we need, and more. There is plenty of busyness and activities to fill our time and our thoughts - always something that needs to be done, or planned for, or worried over. We are well-fed and safe. We are, on the whole, quite comfortable here in the Shire.

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But there is no silencing the ache for More. No matter what techniques we implement to ignore it, it simply will not go away. It may surface in all kinds of unholy places attached to all manner of false gods offering a taste of the life and adventure we desperately crave, (only a taste, but not the real thing,) as John Eldredge and Brent Curtis made so clear in their chapter of The Sacred Romance entitled "Less Wild Lovers". But what are we to do with this longing? As G.K. Chesterton suggests, isn't an adventure something that by it's very nature comes to us, and not something that we can simply find for the seeking? That is no doubt true, to a certain extent.

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But there is another sense in which we are all well aware of choices we have been making that must limit the possibility of an adventure even having the chance of happening to us.

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Like staying off the Road at night. Not allowing it to sweep us off the well-lit, familiar paths of home, out the garden gate, and into the Wild. Shutting our doors to all that is wild and unpredictable. Filling our minds with everyday, common worries. Allowing the fleeting and the insignificant to take up more of our thoughts than the Unseen and the Eternal. Leaving no room in our day for the exercising of our Imagination. Lowering our level of Expectation to match the experience of the moment so as to close the gap between what our life is and what we hoped our life would be. Choosing a way of life marked more by security and predictability than by the tantalizing discomfort of the Unknown.

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Yes, we were created for Romance. For Adventure and Fellowship. For Intimacy. For Abundant Life. And believe it or not, this is what God is longing to give us. Right now - today - His eyes are roaming throughout the Earth, seeking the willing Wayfarers who will follow Him into the glorious Unknown.

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Will He find us waiting beside an open door, our backs to the light of the hearth, our eyes eagerly searching the Road for His approach, our cloak and staff at the ready? When He calls us into His adventure, will we, like Pilgrim, break away from all that holds us back, running from our door and out the garden gate shouting "Life! Life! Eternal Life!"??

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It appears, in our perception of the Lord's timing, that for many of us the time to embark upon the next stage of our adventure is now. The offer is being made now, in this moment. The deeper we fall into the sleep of this ordinary life, the harder it will be to rouse ourselves awake.

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Pray that God will open the eyes of your heart. Shake off this spell of drowsiness. Expect an adventure beyond anything you could ask or imagine.

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...and best leave the front door ajar...

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"For it seems to me that you have set out only just in time, if indeed you are in time. You must now make haste, and neither stay nor turn back; for the Shire is no longer any protection to you."

(Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)

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Derrick and David