You can handle a lot – for a while. You can handle separation from your sweetheart if you know you’ll be greeted with an embrace on your return in a few days. You can put up with a horrendous mess as your kitchen is being remodeled – for a couple weeks. You may be able to tolerate the grueling radiation or chemo for your cancer while you count down the six weeks until it ends. Knowing the end of the story makes things easier.
But what if you don’t know the end of the story? Jim Collins writes of his interview with Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times times during his eight-year imprisonment, Stockdale was credited with helping other men deal with the torture, instituting an elaborate communication system among his fellow captives who were often held in solitary confinement, and exchanging secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters. When questioned about what allowed him to make it through that time with his sanity intact, he credited his ability to be both brutally honest about his present circumstances and at the same time confident that he and the others would get out and prevail in the end. He told Jim Collins,
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. (Good to Great, p. 85)
Jim Stockdale was confident of the end of the story even though none of the circumstances around him provided evidence of such. That makes me think of our own circumstances – and of the end of the story that we are each a part of right now.
This world is in trouble. You and I are in trouble. Sin, sickness, death, political unrest, terrorism, economic fragility, societal controversies over every aspect of morality, natural disasters – something or many somethings are affecting each one of us right now. For all the good we may experience, the brutal facts are anything but good.
But you and I know the end of the story. The Bible tells us about that end. Regardless of how bad things look, the end of the story is that Jesus wins! And death will die.
In this five-minute video, I share what knowing the end of the story has meant to me in the recent death of my husband Al. Take a moment to watch – and share.
[youtube id=”D2cam5s96IQ”]Hold on! We may not know exactly when the end of the story will happen, but we can be absolutely guaranteed of the outcome. Don’t give up now!
“Even so, Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20)
Your Turn: How does knowing the end of the story help you in your present trouble? Leave a comment below.
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- It’s OK to rage against death – because we know the end of the story! Tweet that.
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