Leaving it Behind

Last night was awesome. I went to church, had a good chat with Leah on the phone, and to top it off I watched the Two Towers with one of my roommates. She's trying to get me caught up so that we can all go see Return of the King together, so on Friday night we watched the first one, and last night we watched the second. Those movies are so good. Tolkien had so much imagination to come up with those things. It was really perfect too, because I started reading the Hobbit on my flight back here last weekend, so a lot of things made sense in the beginning that might not have made sense otherwise.

If you've seen the movies you know there's this nasty guy named Gollum (Frodo calls him by his hobbit name but I can't remember what that is right now). Gollum had the ring before Bilbo and Frodo got it, and it practically destoyed him. So, Gollum is living in turmoil because he wants to serve Frodo, but he also wants the ring. There are several scenes where Gollum is arguing with himself whether he should obey his master or kill him and get the ring. There's one scene in particular though that is totally amazing. This is the scene where Gollum actually tells the "other" part of him, the part that wants the ring, to leave. And it does leave. Now, this isn't a climactic part of the movie by any means, but in that scene out of all the three hours of the movie I found myself crying. Why? I could identify with his plight. We go through spiritual battles in much of the same way. There have been tons of times where I've argued internally, trying to distinguish between Satan's lies and the truth of God. I think that's what Tolkien was going for too.