I Believe In Happy Endings — Morning Devotions

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And so we’ve got these proverbs that assure us behind every cloud is a silver lining, and this desire for a happy ending seems deeply embedded within us. When we go to the movies, we hope it’s going to all end happily. We want the right guy to get the right girl, and we want the hero to win, and I think the same is true in life. We want a happy ending. Like the guy I heard about who was a boy who liked to read the last page of the novel first, and then he would read it from the beginning. So no matter how deep the trouble of the hero, he’d cheer him on knowing that there was a happy ending.

The TV show Criminal Minds has a hero named Jason Gideon, and when he left the show, he took off because the bad guys seemed to be winning. And he said, I have to go and find what I lost – my belief in happy endings. In the 2013 film August: Osage County, the actress Meryl Streep plays the harsh matriarch of a dysfunctional family, and this movie shows the family ripping itself apart. Scene after scene.

There’s no warmth or hope, and it ends with Meryl Streep weeping in the arms of the housekeeper as each of her daughters abandons her. And as the credits roll at the end of the movie, audiences are presented with the scene of the eldest daughter, played by Julia Roberts, standing in a field, smiling as she watches horses playing together as the sun goes down and in the background the pop song ‘Things are always better when we’re all together’.

Well, the reality is that families sometimes do come apart with friction, and even though we wish there was a happy ending, it goes on this resentment and rage from one generation to the next. Many people, unfortunately, do not have happy endings.

Howard Hughes was worth $2.5 billion at his death, and this goes back a long time. He owned a private fleet of Jets, Hotels, casinos, and when asked to claim his body, his nearest relative, a cousin said, Is this Mr Hughes? Howard Hughes had spent the last 15 years of his life a drug addict, and the only remembrance he received was a moment of silence in the Las Vegas casinos.

And the Time magazine said that his death was commemorated by a moment of silence, and the boss leaned forward and said, OK, roll. The diocese had his minute. Not a happy ending for the billionaire Howard Hughes. As followers of Jesus, we don’t have to go through life with any measure of uncertainty. We have the assurance of salvation through Jesus Christ, which means we can rest assured how our life will end or, better yet, how it will continue into eternity with Jesus.

So there is a sense and a real sense in which we can believe in happy endings, an ending that begins in God’s kingdom. The Christian author William James said – The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. And spending your time as a committed Christian gives you an eternal perspective and a desire to live each day for God’s glory and not your own. Even if you don’t know where your life is going. God does. And he has a plan for every single one of us, and that includes eternal life in heaven with him.

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Let’s Pray

Heavenly Father, sometimes we think it’s wishful thinking to have a happy ending, that life’s full of happy endings, and we realise that life has its shares of downtimes. And yet, ultimately, when we put our faith and trust in you, everything will work out for the best that when we die, we can spend eternity with you. And that’s the greatest ending that any of us can have. Thank you, Lord, for this good news, Amen.