Was Sam courageous?

I have been reading Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (and I watched it the other night too). I’ve read it many times before, but I just love the way that Tolkien reads. He has a phenomenal ability to write.

I reached the part where Frodo, Sam and Gollum are just entering into the secret passage into Mordor and Gollum sabotages Sam while the Hobbits slept. He threw away their only food supply and then blamed Sam, claiming that ‘The fat hobbit ate all the bread.’ Sam knew that Gollum was trying to betray the hobbits, but Sam couldn’t get Frodo to see… Frodo ended up sending Sam home, telling him that he didn’t’ want him to continue on the quest.

Poor Sam, travelling all that way to be betrayed by his best friend. Someone he cared for so much, they had gone through so much together, and he was discarded so easily. Tolkien writes this so well. I can relate to the fat hobbit, it feels horrible to be rejected.

But Sam had courage. If I could describe courage as something, I would describe it as simply doing the right thing. Not only that, but it is doing the right thing when it is difficult to do so. This means that, someone can do the right thing and still be petrified with fear. Having courage means doing the right thing although the odds of failure, rejection, etc. are stacked against you. I think Sam had tremendous courage because he doubled back for his friend.

It makes us wonder how many of us will be like Sam. Ideally, we all say that we will be by our friends’ side, that we would always double back for our buddies. But how many of us would actually be there for the ones that we love when the chips are down? How many of us would stick by our friends, no matter the consequences, and how many would leave those we love twisting in the wind?

I hope that’s a question that I never have answered. When it comes to integrity, it is a rare quality, and many who claim to possess it, clearly do not and many whom we think have none, do possess it. Unfortunately, it is a quality that is only revealed in extreme circumstances.

A person’s true identity only shines through when the chips are down, when things are not going according to plan. When life is good, it’s difficult to measure a person’s merit, but when life is the shits, and it seems like nothing is going right, it is very easy to measure a person. It is these times when we are allowed to see who people really are, when they are faced with adversity.

I pray to God that I have been given the wisdom to recognise these instances and that I make the correct measurements of worth, and I pray that I may measure up the way I have been raised, to be honest, faithful, courteous, to forgive and of course to love as we were meant to.