What is the difference between a story with a happy ending and a story with a sad ending? What’s the difference between a comedy and a tragedy?
It’s probably not what you think. At least not if you rolled your eyes and thought, “If the ending is happy or sad, of course… duh!” But, I don’t think so, I think there is more to it than that.
What determines if a story has a happy or sad ending is not the events that take place but when you stop telling the story. A story is quite different if you stop too soon. Think about it, every “happily ever after” could have another chapter where Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty give up after 25 years of marriage and she gets half of his kingdom, and they both get lawyers to fight over the details. After Little Red was saved from the wolf she might have been attacked by a gang of angry dwarfs on the way home.
I’m not being a pessimist, though. Every tragic ending could merely be the seed of a new beginning. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again, but who really thought the horses would be able to fix a broken egg? Maybe someone finally sent a message to the King and He raised Humpty back to life, to sit on a wall once more (to the amazement of the horses.)
If you stop telling the story of Jesus on Good Friday you will never see the glory of Easter morning. The story also needs to continue to the ascension to truly understand the victorious full circle that the Son of God made in His incarnation. And we have to take a few steps back and look at a bigger picture if we want to see how the story that began in the creation of the heavens and the earth with a man and a woman in a garden ends in a glorious new heavens and new earth, and a wonderful new garden. All of the pain and suffering that was a result of that first sin, the centuries of sacrifice, perseverance, overcoming tragedy through the mercy of God’s faithfulness, and generations of lovers, parents and dreamers exploring the mysteries of love and forgiveness, each of these lives telling the greater story that points to the return of Jesus and the new kingdom that He will fully establish.
It’s all in where we stop telling the story.
We believe that there is ultimately a happy ending. The work of Jesus means that there will be victory over darkness and death, that we inherit heaven and eternal life. We believe that the work God has started in each of us, He will be faithful to complete. We trust in this and it is our hope. But, there is a tension, another side, there is a mystery. There is the part we have to do.
Over and over God reminds us to finish the race once we start running. Persevere to the end … Do not grow weary of well doing … See it through … Don’t lose hope when things become hard … Remember the faith of your youth when you have grown old … Don’t give up. God will be faithful, but we need to be faithful, too.
Your life is your story, so keep telling it until you get to a good ending.
There is still hope for Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming if they don’t give up. And Little Red can take a bunch of dwarfs, it might be a good fight, but isn’t that exactly what we are called to?
1 Timothy 6:12
“Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”