The Great Story

Lately, I've just been struggling with this cloud of anger that has been following me throughout each day.  It seems like it's been hanging over me for a couple of weeks now and each day I think, "Tomorrow it'll be gone and I'll be at peace,"  but tomorrow keeps arriving and I'm still prickly and annoyed.  I find myself just sitting and twisting and pulling my hair, which is not a good thing as I get older and older!

I know circumstances in life and relationships are behind this anger...this feeling of losing things that I treasure, yet I know it's not truly the circumstances that matter, but the spiritual battle I'm losing right now....I know I'm struggling to trust God when I feel like He's stripping me of so much that I hold dear, my fear of the future becomes anger directed at Him and deep inside becomes the cry of "Am I worthy of love?"   I'm struggling to believe that even though I see a lonely road ahead, that He has a perfect plan for me and for those I love.    I find myself identifying with Sam's question from the Two Towers..."How could the end be happy?"  But see what he goes onto say......

SAM: "I know. It's all wrong. By rights, we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in 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 had 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 will shine out the clearer.  

Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something.  Even if you were too small to understand why.  But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. 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."

FRODO: "What are we holding on to, Sam?"

SAM: "That there's something good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for."

There is something good worth fighting for.....and I am praying and fighting for it....to trust God's character, His sovereignty, His love for me.  I know this story He's writing in my life does mean something - it's the story of my verse...John 3:30  He must become greater, I must become less.