No Happy Endings

I’ve stopped looking for happy endings. Look for a spectacular, all-the-pieces fit resolution to a trying situation, and you settle for less. Pin your heart-felt dreams on receiving just the answer you want — and you sell yourself short.

Happy endings are for the near-sighted, for those with perfect vision but who don’t look over the horizon, or who maybe forget that this spinning globe we trek across day by day gathers up time and events and change and other people — even as we try to keep our balance in the gyrating top that is our lives.

Happy endings are for the weak-kneed who grab the first bus that comes along and take a comfortable seat, failing to calculate that sooner or later the bus is going to run out of gas with still a lot of road ahead.

I take argument with anyone who is content with a happy ending…when God has so much more to add to our isolated moments of joy, wanting to add more and more to our stories.

Cinderella’s glass slipper unites her with Prince Charming and they live happily ever after? That’s got to be a fairy tale. It falls short of the best of life and is nothing compared with life in Jesus Christ where every good ending has a post script followed by another and another, each compounding more blessing on what we assumed was the limit.

Jesus wants to give us more — more than we can measure, imagine, dream, expect, hope for, wish for, understand. That is his nature, that is his life. If we settle for The Happy Ending, we pass on The What Next that makes happy endings small and meaningless in comparison.

If we say our answered prayers are enough (“thank you, Lord”), we don’t allow God to work on the unanswered prayers that we don’t acknowledge.

If we put a box around our lives for what we think we can happily receive, where is God going to put all the other things he has waiting for us? And how are we ever going to fit God into our lives?

I am convinced of the immensity of God who connects all the dots in the universe and makes them work. I stagger under the engineering know-how of God who finds every frayed ending, every loose wire, every microscopic cell and joins them into a grand scheme. I am bowled over by a Father Guardian Teacher who at the end of each experience of His grace and greatness lets us breathe just long enough before saying, “And now I want to show you something more!”

My life is one of faith — ordinary, simple faith that directs me to trust in God for the next step. Nothing fancy, just: “Here’s something small you can do, and if you have a hard time with it, lack the confidence or strength, look, I’m right here with you, let me help you.”

Faith is not for the extraordinary, not for super humans but for ordinary, human people. That’s us. And grace is what God gives to help us who have but a grain of faith discover that it’s not what we do but who He is.

In the Bible, we read of how God called Abraham out from his home, his country, his people to a place of promise. Abraham did this by faith – by faith in a personal God who personally called him. This God who spoke intimately to Abraham became known as “the God of Abraham,” the God who was mighty to uphold Abraham, deliver him, guide him, and even give him children when he and his wife Sarah were advanced in age.

When the next generation arose, God became “the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac. “ (Gen 32:9). And then the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. (Exodus 4:6). The pattern of faith continued through the Bible, transferred to generation after generation, over each succeeding horizon without resigning to a happy ending because God was not finished with his story.

The Letter to the Hebrews recounts in the 11th chapter a litany of faithful people who continued the journey: Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, David, and the prophets among others. It says in verse 3: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.”

As people of faith and the seed of successive generations, we should likewise stand waiting for God to reveal more of Himself and His promises. We should be standing at the gate, welcoming future promises from a distance with our hearts open wide.

When we do, we learn to walk by faith – not just standing at the gate, but walking toward the promises. Hebrews calls it “a better country.” It is the country inhabited by wonder and miracles, by blessing that we can only experience because we didn’t settle for the happy ending.

God always has another chapter that he wants to write in our lives. He is a page-turner who takes the painful, tear-stained chapters of our lives and redeems them with a better story – a story that only can be written because we allow him to take what we thought was over and done—the worthless remains of our lives— and use it to write us into eternity.

God uses everything. That’s why he made his son Jesus the Savior. God is in the business of beginnings, seeing endings only as a transition to what lies ahead. That being the case, why waste such great beginnings with a premature happy ending. I say the best is yet to come.