St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

In Lord of the Rings, it is Sam who asks the question, sort of rhetorically, "Is everything sad going to come untrue?” He asks this question when he sees that Gandalf, who he thought was dead, is indeed alive. He also asks this question because everything in his world that he loved had been lost—his home, his friends, his pipe weed, his pots and pans, and he even believed himself dead. So to see something he loved not lost sends him into deep wonder, and you can almost feel the sadness melting away, a sadness that had grown and intensified for almost a year. For almost a year, he had watched the world he loved systematically taken away. Sadness is what you feel when something you love is taken away or lost. In a fallen world, we have no choice but to deal continually with sadness. The deeper we love something, the more sadness we feel when it is lost. In fact, as uncertain as the world is, there is no way we can avoid sadness. I remember thinking that, with six children, I had multiplied my capacity for deep