Everything sad

It started when Rebecca sent me a link to a song called The Golden Boy & The Prodigal, by Jason Gray, over at the The Rabbit Room.

It was a very good song about dichotomy, not musically stunning, but okay, and lyrically excellent. If you haven't listened to that song, and you want to, here's a direct link. But, this isn't about that song.

As I continued to follow The Rabbit Room, soon afterward, Mr. Gray posted two more of his songs. Both of them are based off of a quote from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, When Sam asks Gandalf if "everything sad is going to come untrue?" Gray wrote this about it:

The beauty of those words rang so many bells inside of me: the idea not that everything sad is untrue (which would be a cruel invalidation of our present sorrows) – nor that everything will come untrue someday (which reduces the hope of redemption to mere wishful thinking) – but that somehow, even right now in the face of the saddest that we see, the seeds of its undoing are sown. In fact, they were sown the day the body of Jesus, like a seed himself, was laid in the ground. What took root on Easter is the undoing of the curse, and it is flowering all around us if we have eyes to see it.

I like both songs very much (Part one is, in my opinion, musically superior though) However, I'm not quite sure if I agree with the premise of the songs. That everything sad is coming untrue. I believe adamantly that everything sad will come untrue, but are we even now watching that happen? I'm not so sure. I may simply be a pessimist, but I don't see the world becoming a better place. Obviously, this could be do to a lack of perspective, an attitude problem (The glass is half empty. Period.) or simply, as Gray says, because I don't have eyes to see it.

But, if my churches obsession with End Times theology has taught me anything, it's that things are going to get pretty bad around here before everything's over. Really bad. "Lots of dead people" and "global warming ain't nothing" and "bowls of God's wrath poured out upon the earth" bad. Sounds like, if everything sad is coming untrue even now, it's going to come true again before it comes untrue for the last time. Maybe.

They're still good songs though, even if I'm not sure that they're right. Give them a listen.