The sad story of life

If life is a story, like everyone says, and God is not finished writing it then the story must be a mystery novel. And it’s not the kind of mystery novel where Sherlock Holmes sorts out every clue in a neat pile and reveals all the answers at the last possible moment and then everyone lives happily ever after. Life is the mystery that never gets resolved. It’s sad most of the time, all the favorite characters are killed off and replaced by new ones whom will all be killed off soon too in a vicious cycle and each page seems to say “ok, I know it sucks right now but the next page is gonna be great.”

All my life I’ve lived with the hope of God’s victory, hope that everything will soon be resolved. I’ve clung to this hope while all along living in a chaotic mess. Each turn in my life has brought new problems which sometimes replace old ones. It’s a good thing that the old problems are gone but the new ones never turn out to be a whole lot easier to handle. When’s it all gonna get fixed? No wonder people end up believing that the only way the world can be restored is by its destruction. With every one of these turns, these new eras in life, the hope remains that the next turn will be the last great turn to harmony. But like the sad mystery novel that turn never comes and the mystery is never resolved. We’re left buried in the mystery suffocating under it, begging for mercy. Please give us some resolution!

Why hope? Why keep waiting and working for that next turn? Do we never catch on that it’s just not coming?

But maybe this is the pain of life. Maybe life is all about this ugly mystery and every moment is pain until the day we die. Even Jesus hung on a cross before His last turn. And His life is supposed to be an example to us, right? But of course Jesus life didn’t end with pain His life was resurrected in new life… harmony.

It may look impossible, it may seem never ending. The mystery may never be resolved but the resurrection will come… it has to. God will bring things back to Him, He will restore things. Maybe the real resurrection is not on the next page but on the page you’re on right now or the one you just finished reading. You might have to re-read a little bit but it’s there. It won’t necessarily jump off the page at you in fact that may be the true mystery of it all; what seems to be death is somehow life. The page that seems to say “I know it sucks right now…” might really be saying “read that again, you missed the best part.”