I once wrote the following: “Everyone’s life story is a tragedy, because in the end, the hero dies.” As I’ve thought about that over the years, I’ve decided that sentence really isn’t true. Why? Because we don’t stay dead.

And so in the end, the story of each individual, and for that matter, the story of the whole history of the world, is a comedy. Comedies can have bad things happen in them, after all: people slip on banana peels and misunderstandings result in funny arguments and broken hearts—think of a standard episode of I Love Lucy—but in the end everything is resolved and everyone laughs. The resurrection will be when everyone laughs.

The problem with stories that end tragically like the movie A.I., where the boy-android’s search for love concludes with loneliness and death, is that they are fundamentally unrealistic if one accepts that the world is a comedy.

Or to look at it another way: such tragic tales are truncated. They are not a full story. The full story always has a happy ending.

I think most of us like happy endings in our fiction because that’s what we yearn for in life. The good news of the gospel is just that: that the ending actually will be happy. So though the credits of the movie A.I. run where they do, I must, in my mind, imagine the story goes just a bit further, and that in the morning, his mother is not dead, but awakens and so they live happily ever after.

Among the novels that I have written, Somewhere Obscurely in an early draft came closest to having a sad ending. But it wasn’t sad at all. Though I had the protagonist Aramond dying in his attempt to save the woman he loves, the story doesn’t end with a corpse: “The darkness was brief. Though Aramond was dead, he didn’t mind at all. Heaven does really interesting things to your sense of perspective.”

It is hard to have an eternal perspective before we are in eternity. After all, we cannot see eternity. But as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “God has set eternity in our hearts.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) God promises us a happy ending, but more than that, he promises us “I am with you to the end of the world.” He is with us now, not just in the by and by. The kingdom of God is today, not just tomorrow. Certainly we do not experience the lack of pain or the lack of death today. But it’s not just a grin and bear it until the end, either. There is relief now. It is based on how you choose to perceive stuff based on the eternal perspective, the eternity that God has given us today, in this moment. Then, when the flat tires of life come, you will have the strength to get them changed.

Send to Kindle