J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, made clear in his private writings he intended to proclaim a Christian message through his fictional writings.

Tolkien lived through the two world wars, yet he never lost his faith that those catastrophes the devil intends for evil, God turns to good. He embedded that faith in the very creation of his famous imaginative world.

In the posthumously published book The Silmarillion, Tolkien has the spirits sing Middle-earth into existence. The melody of Illuvatar (God) was "deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came."

Melkor (Satan) interfered with a loud, brash tune, trying to "drown the other music by the violence of its voice." But the "most triumphant notes" of Melkor's discordant song were "taken up by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern."

As a man who himself had faced the monstrous evil that lay behind war, Tolkien didn't sugarcoat his message. He knew the horrific events God uses for good are no less horrific for those who experience them. In The Silmarillion, he put it this way: "Evil may yet be good to have been, and yet remain evil."

It is hard to speak of the positive results of catastrophic events when people we have loved are dead and landmarks we have known are destroyed. For example, we can never see 9/11 as anything but evil. Yet, as our minds reawaken to the horror of war, the same horror that helped impart realism and strength to the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, we may rediscover the bedrock source of that strength—the knowledge of the God who, through and only through an awful death at the hands of sinful men, rose and redeemed humankind.