Russell Moore: Are you wandering to Rivendell?

I subscribe to the YouTube channel of the poet Malcolm Guite. Whenever one of his videos—usually him talking in his study, pipe in one hand and a book in the other—pops up, I save it to watch at night when I have time. A couple of weeks ago, though, his video prompted me to stop right there and watch immediately.

That’s because Guite’s setting was one of my favorite places on the planet, a place where I once felt a sense of overwhelming awe at the creative work of God. He was in the Lauterbrunnen Valley of Switzerland.

Guite pointed out that those of us who found ourselves at some point or other moved by this place are hardly alone. J. R. R. Tolkien—walking through there as a 19-year-old—later modeled Rivendell, the mythical spot of respite and safety in the Lord of the Rings books, after that very setting.

After the video, I picked up my copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to read the section set there, the one that Guite read aloud from a bench at the bottom of the Lauterbrunnen waterfall. I noticed how many highlights I’ve made in that part of the book over the years, even though I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did so. One especially caught my eye.

Speaking of Bilbo Baggins’s journeys, Tolkien wrote: "When he had left Hobbiton he had wandered off aimlessly, along the Road or in the country on either side; but somehow he had steered all the time towards Rivendell."

I wonder if you’ve found that to be true in your life. I have in mine. Knowing that we are, as Scripture tells us, pilgrims in this time-between-the-times, we sometimes expect that we should be marching forward to Zion with a detailed map, knowing exactly what route we are taking. We are surprised, then, when the roads veer off in ways we did not expect. Sometimes, we might even feel lost, and so lost that nobody will even know how to find us.

Only later do we realize that we were—usually completely beyond our own noticing—steering the whole time toward the truer and greater Rivendell. That’s because we are pilgrims, yes, but also sheep. We think we are steering when, often, we are being steered, toward green pastures and still waters.

Maybe that’s where you are right now—what seems to be the valley of the shadow of death. Look behind you, though. Maybe what’s been chasing you has been goodness and mercy, the whole way.