Happy Endings

Some days are just hard. Days when its seems like the best thing that can be said about them is, "Thank God its over." Days full of shadows. Everything seems dark, and it seems like it will always be that way.

Sometimes I wish things could be a lot more like my favorite books. Things might be dark for a while, but in the end, things work out. A happy ending.

But in this broken world, happy endings are few and far between. Crime. Pain. Disease. Separation. All ultimately culminating in death. Over and over and over. All around. From the latest breaking news to the oldest pages of history- scrawled each pages is hopeless helpless agony caused by sin. The beautiful world God made is broken. No happy endings.

So God came. He had a dark and gloomy and disreputable beginning. A difficult beginning and homeless middle- followed by being chased out of town, threatened, rejected and ultimately, murdered. He came, and got to know all about sorrow and suffering- so that He could change the endings. He came and died to bring back happy endings. He suffered, He "bore our sins and carried our sorrows" so that the great big Final Ending could be a happy one. Even the little endings were changed. So that the days when my heart just screams "God- why in the world?!" the answer comes through "because I love you."
It's not necessarily a different ending- but it makes it happy, to know that God has picked this particular ending of this situation, this day,  because He loves me.