Sometimes I have these thoughts come to me at the oddest times, when I'm not thinking about anything related. This one occurred to me yesterday, when my sister made a comment about her recent reading.
She is reading through The Lord of the Rings again, and she expressed her mild [amused] frustration at the characters. They are about to engage the enemy in the Battle of Minas Tirith and are - understandably! - a bit concerned about whether they will even live out the night. Will Aragorn make it safely through the Paths of the Dead? Will Rohan's forces arrive in time? Will they come at all? Will this character survive? Will that character die in battle? All legitimate questions, we would say. However, my sister, having read the book before, knows exactly how it all will turn out. She knows that the battle will be won by the allies and that many of them do not only survive the battle but live on a good many more years in relative happiness and safety. Of course a few of the beloved characters suffer wounds or even death, yes - but that's all known! I commented to Melissa, "But the characters don't know that." Of course not! They are inside the story, still awaiting the end of the tale and the victory in the battle.
Then it hit me - we are in a Story too! And we fret and worry too, not knowing how our lives, or our friends' lives, or the life of our country, will turn out in the end. But there is One who is outside the Story who already knows and is not concerned. We, the little characters stumbling about on the earthly terrain of our world, are only able to see what is directly ahead of us. We are not given the power to see how it will all pan out in the end. We are not even given vision-like glimpses of the future, like Seth Border from Blink. It is only given to us to live each day as it comes.
The difference between you and me and Frodo, Gandalf, Pippin, Aragorn, Eomer, and the others is that we know the One who is on the Outside, the One who already knows the ending to our Story. Nay, the ending to HIS Story! For He not only knows the end - He wrote it! In fact, He has even stepped down into our Story and become a character in it, right alongside us. And He asks us to trust Him that it all will end well. In fact, in a way far beyond the ending of any fairy tale written by anyone before, we will indeed live "happily ever after", in the courts of the King.
But the details of today, tomorrow, and the day after that, and the days after that, are not within our sight. We do not know what characters will survive, we do not know about each individual battle. And it's okay. Because the Author does know, and He asks us to trust in that.
"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." (Revelation 21:1-4)
"And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.' (The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis)
