Happy Endings

Imagine this: you walk Lamictal and alcohol into a Ally hilfiger rehab theater and Minocycline hydrochloride sit down Www.lisinopril.com to watch a movie.  People are crunching popcorn as you wait anxiously for the previews to end and the movie to start.  You have been looking forward to a good movie for a while and this is going to be it.  The lights dim.  People get quiet.  The screen lights up.  The story ensues.  The characters go through so much.  Action!  Drama! Great joy and great sorrow!  Heroics!  Love!  All the hallmarks of a good movie flash before your eyes but here comes the best part: the ending.  You are so sure it is going to be the best ending ever full of problems solved, boy gets girl, and neatly tied up moments.  Then everybody dies arbitrarily.  Huh?  Surely that wasn’t the end.  The credits roll.  That couldn’t be the end!  But it is.  Where is the happy ending?

As many of you know, I am an avid reader and watcher of movies. To be specific I am a story connoisseur.  It really doesn’t matter what the genre, if it has a compelling story driven by well-rounded characters I will enjoy it.  One thing I have noticed about stories is that most of them end happily.  That movie mentioned above wouldn’t be made.  We humans are hard-wired to want happy endings.  We want to see the characters in our fiction end their story on a happy note.

In the same way we are looking for happy endings in our own lives.  Do you remember being a kid and anticipating Christmas?  There was that one thing that if you got it your life would be whole and complete.  Then Christmas Day comes and you got it!  Happy ending.  We love to anticipate things and events and watch them come to pass.  Our lives are full of little stories and we want them all to end happy.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But some end up happy and some don’t.  When they don’t we move on as best we can and look toward the next happy ending.

Here is the rub.  Our lives can be full of small stories that end happily but when it comes to our life as a whole there is no other ending but a bad one.  We will all die.  Loved ones will be taken from us and we will all someday be taken from those we love on this earth.  So, ultimately, every one of our stories here will have a sad or bad ending.

So how do we reconcile these two things?  We all desire happy endings but all we will get is death on this earth.  And even when death is a relief it is still a bad ending.

Could it be that we were made to desire happy endings and that they were meant to be fulfilled?  But how is that when the only thing absolutely sure in life is death?

If we get a bad ending in life we look beyond that to our next story.  There is something bigger than that one event.  If all we did was focus on that one bad event we would be consumed with the fact that our life is pointless and  not fulfilling.  In the same way, if we look at the end of our life as the end of our story we could easily become depressed because we want the happy ending.  There must be a bigger story going on.

The reconciliation point between these two things is Jesus Christ.  If we try to solely fulfill ourselves here on this earth we will ultimately be dissatisfied.  Everything we work for will be lost when we die.  If instead we realize that our hope for a happy ending is with Christ then we have something glorious to look forward to.  We will get our happy ending in Christ.

If we look at the end of our life as the end of the story we will be disappointed.  If we look at the end of our life as just another ending in the bigger and better story of our eternity then our desire for a happy ending will be fulfilled.  We will have an eternity to be happy in Christ.

Death is not the end of the story.  If it is we have nothing to look forward to.  If Christ is our treasure then we have everything to look forward to.