To Frodo

¹ In the Lord of the Rings, the little hobbit Frodo Baggins goes through countless perils and hardships and into the very heart of the Dark Lord's domain to destroy the One Ring by casting it into the fires of Mount Doom. As he reaches the lip of the volcano against all odds, in the last moment, Frodo succumbs to the temptations of the Ring and tries to keep it for himself. To many, this looks like a failure, like Frodo fumbled the ball on the one yard line. But Frodo was never meant to destroy the One Ring. Throughout Frodo’s journey, he encounters the creature Gollum. Frodo is given many opportunities to destroy Gollum, including once when keeping him alive defied the law of the land. But Frodo does not give in to the temptation to destroy this wretched creature. Every time Frodo chooses mercy and pity over violence and destruction. Frodo’s real mission was to get the ring to Mount Doom but not to destroy it. The ring was destroyed not in spite of Frodo’s failure, but because of his victory. Frodo allowed pity to stay his hand when he would have destroyed Gollum, and this victory allowed Gollum to be in the right place at the right time to destroy the ring. None of us knows for sure what we are put on this Earth to do. Many of us will seem to fail in spectacular and irreversible ways. We may think we have blown all of our chances, that nothing we did mattered in the end. But we have no idea what the real challenge is. We don't know which small acts of random kindness might end up being more important in the grand scheme of things than big epic quests. Maybe our dream was always to help cure cancer and we thought that meant excelling in school and getting hired by some fancy research lab. But maybe we help someone who was having a really bad day who was about to quit everything but our small kindness helped change their lives around and they end up curing cancer. There is a master plan for each of us and it is stranger and more wonderful than we could ever imagine and we won't know until it's over how small our failures and how big our successes were.