J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings was also translated the book of Jonah for The Jerusalem Bible. He as a devout Christian and even though he did not write The Lord of the Rings as an explicitly Christian book, we as Christians can learn a great deal about our faith from it. Here is one of the most meaningful exchanges of the book as a Hobbit named Frodo and a Wizard named Gandalf discuss the dark times they live in and the difficult task ahead of them.
“‘I wish it [the growth of evil] need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J. R. R. Tolkien [1]
Let us choose wisely how to use the time that God has given to us.
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings One Volume (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past.”