In the Spring of 2015, I sat in a Chuy’s dining room and cried over a margarita with my three best friends just days before our college graduation. Expressing how sad I’d been feeling the past semester, they frankly (but lovingly) responded with a, “Duh. You hate endings.”
A whopping seven years later, I have realized that it’s not conclusions I dread so much…it’s the lack of a new beginning that should take its place. Work, relationships, interests, hobbies: they’re all evolving, and I feel like I cannot find my footing. Being completely vulnerable, however, my Grandpa dying at the beginning of the year is what’s really sent me into a tailspin of finale-fear…after all, death is (morbidly) the ultimate hard-stop to a saga…
But I’m not the same 22 year old I was in that restaurant because I have the glorious gift of perspective. I know I’ve been here before, and while it totally sucks sitting in this despair, I at least can see a bit farther out into the horizon. (Thank you, therapy!)
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
In craving newness, my tendency is to shun all aspects of endings. But God’s power is so much greater than any human interpretation of what goodness is to come. Through Christ, we transcend beginnings and endings. Through Christ, we have eternity.
Food for thought: What would your life look like if you didn’t fear the future?
Rachel Fisher 