Think about the favorite, well-thumbed book of your childhood. Your Lord of the Rings. Your Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Your Gospel of Luke. Let it be to you whichever volume you kept under your pillow and read furtively with the lamp turned low past bedtime, while with one ear you listened for your mother’s tread upon the landing.
If you take any of those stories in the middle, you find a situation past resolution, the hero in the clutches of the dragon and the lovers sundered forever by their parents’ decree. The pierced Savior sleeps entombed and the disciples tremble in the basement. All is lost.
But even as children we somehow knew that stories could not end that way. Armed with that blessed assurance we slogged expectantly through pages of despair and defeat, onto the peace, love, and victors’ bliss that awaited us in the last chapter.
Twenty six years into my life, I believe that our lives are stories that have not yet reached their final chapters.
I believe that the passages of tedium, defeat, and sorrow will find their place in the purpose of the years.
I believe that the fruitless hours spent waiting in the cold, the painful accidents of chance, and the rout of our bodies by cancer and age and long hard use will prove all along to have fit into the Potter’s palms.
I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the live everlasting.
I believe in the end of the story.
1 comment:
Well said.
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