Surprise Endings

I am reading a very long tome called Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln and his compatriots. It is something like 750 pages long. It’s a good book, full of fascinating characters, and a story which holds up a mirror to our current national divisions. So, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading it, but as I got to page 150 I was thinking, ‘This story is never going to end!’

We live for the end.  We love good endings.  We love to read the book that is full of mysterious twists and turns and our minds begin to imagine the end.  “How will this end?”, we wonder, and the temptation to turn to the last page can become overwhelming.  How can the author bring together all of these plot lines and solve all of the main character’s dilemmas in the remaining pages? 

Sometimes the story is so good that we don’t want it to end.  We would rather stay lost in the writer’s imagination. We don’t want the story to end, because, well, this is the life we want to live and, even though we cannot live that life, we can imagine it. So, we slow down our reading pace, drinking in each word, like the first sip of morning coffee or the last sip of evening wine. 

Today is the Sabbath before the Sunday on which the crowds adored the main character. They loved His story. The king is coming! They couldn’t wait to see how his story would end.

But wait, is he a king or criminal? Who could have dreamt that this is what the Author had in mind? Their songs become jeers,  their palms become swords. He’s dead. End of story. Or is it?

We live for the end. We love good endings. But we are all writing His story into our own stories. In your life, is Jesus an irrelevant, dead man or a living King?  How do you want the story to end?

This Holy Week  don’t skip to the ending.  Live the whole of the journey. Perhaps you will discover that that the ending is still being written, that, SURPRISE, His story is your story. Keep on writing.