A happy ending

It's hard to imagine anyone but the most hard-core of people not liking stories with a happy ending.  It seems as though everyone I've ever met or heard about seems to like them.  Whether it's a huge volume like Lord Of The Rings or the Narnia series - the books or the movies - or whether it's something very Hollywood like Pretty Woman or wonderfully inspiring like Rudy or the recent movie The Blind Side, there's just something that draws people of all cultures, belief systems, and socio-economic status to stories like this, real or fictional.

It's almost as though we all have this built-in desire for true justice and for things to work out right in the end.  But as soon as the book is shut or the final movie credits start to roll, we're forced to come down off the high and step back into reality.  'Too bad things couldn't be that way in my life', you might think, or 'If only things like that could really come true'.  Sadly, these are thoughts we're more apt to think in our youth.  By the time most of us reach our thirties, we don't even entertain thoughts of any such wonderful things happening in our lives.

But is this true?  Is there really no happy ending for our lives?  (Most of you know where I'm going with this, but bear with me.)  Is life really nothing more than "death and taxes"?  You know, even speaking as a Christian, there are days when I lose perspective and really get bogged down and even depressed about life.  Hey, I'm only human after all - even the most spiritually inclined people can get down about things.

Before I decided to put the full weight of my trust in the promise of the Bible - eternal life to all who believe in the name of Jesus Christ - I must admit that I had no hope of anything and I got regularly discouraged and depressed.  Thoughts of suicide entered the mix on occasion.  Sure, I was working toward a university degree and my future was full of promise, but because I thought I'd be extinct at the end of my life span, I didn't know what I was ultimately working toward.

What was the point if this life here on earth was all there was or would be?  What would be the point of trying to leave a legacy when I would have no recall of it once I died?

But now, seeing things through the lens of the Bible, I see this life entirely differently.  I've never really had a "bad day" since I asked Jesus to forgive me and to become the Lord of my life; it's more like a "few bad hours" at most.  And I realize that life is so much more than money and achievement, although at times it's easy to lose perspective of the important things in life.

The non-believer thinks that people like me are living a fantasy, trying to think "happy thoughts" to ease the pain and burden of this life through belief in a make-believe deity, a figment of my imagination.  I've never been a happy-go-lucky sort of person, but rather a deep and reasoned individual.  I devote a great deal of time and energy into things before making a decision about them, and my decision to accept God's gentle nudges in my life in order to believe in him - as much as I tried to resist at first - were no different.  God was gently pounding away at my thick, narrow-minded, assumptive skull for about two years before the reality of his existence became glaringly obvious to me.  And once that occurred, only then did the promise of eternal life - of the greatest happy ending imaginable - also become glaringly obvious to me.

I know that non-believers think people like me are deluded, brainwashed - whatever - to believe in what the Bible has to say about anything, let alone this promise of eternal life to those who put their faith in some historical figure named Jesus.  But even though I've mentioned this in a previous post, it bears paraphrased repeating now:

What if the Bible is for real?  What if its claims are actually true?  If this is the case, what do I have to gain by believing what it says about Heaven and Hell, for example, and what do I have to lose by not believing?

I realized that if I was wrong and the Bible was right, then I'd be paying the price for an eternity, one of separation from God in a place the Bible calls Hell.  Could I have rationalized Hell out of existence if I didn't want to believe it wasn't for real?  Likewise with Heaven?  Did I want to take the chance and not believe in God and the Bible because I was arrogant, prideful, or afraid of what others might think of me?

I eventually decided that I'd rather assume that God and the Bible are for real - the price would be too great and horrible not to! - and in so doing I accepted Jesus into my life.  Since then, the confirmation of the reality of God and his unfathomable love (not fear of him anymore!) and the absolute truth of the Bible (and no other documents claiming to be "scripture") has been very real and very immense:  God's Spirit living within me has been fast at work revealing these things ever since.  And therefore I have the most unshakable, most confident assurance that by one simple act of faith several years ago - a moment, really - my existence will indeed have a happy ending on the basis of the claims of the Bible, not on fantasy.

Although this conclusion seems foolish to many, I live day to day with this assurance that they will never have apart from Jesus Christ, and therefore I don't fear death - or life - like they do (even though they don't admit it).  If this hope is my "crutch", so be it.  But I'd rather have a crutch like God in my life than the meaningless and non-eternal crutches like status, possessions, career and/or climbing the corporate ladder, drugs, self-help books, atheism, evolutionism, New Age gurus and the like that non-believers put their faith and trust in.