Looking Beyond Your Chapter

I love my daughter.

No, really….she is amazing. Smart, beautiful, witty….and she inherited my love for reading.

But she has this tendency that drives me crazy. Honestly, I try to respect her  independence and her God-given right to an opinion. But, well, there is something she does when she reads book that just seems wrong. Unethical. Immoral, even. In technical terms, a giant “no-no.”

When she begins to read a book and starts to connect with the characters in the story, she does a Google search to find out what happens to them!

THERE, I said it! I have given away this despicable habit that I apparently missed when I was instructing her on what is right and wrong.

Seriously, she MUST know what happens to them at the end of the story.

To me, that defeats the purpose of reading. Like, for me, that’s a big part of the fun….not knowing who lives or dies…..having to learn as I go about who falls in love or who befriends another, which characters grow and change vs the ones who remain static. To me, those reveals are part of the mystery of reading…..the “magic” of the book, so to speak.

But not for my daughter!

Noooooooooooo……she needs to know up front about these things.

Why? (I’m glad you asked because I know I certainly have)

Her reasoning is self-protection really. She doesn’t want to get overly attached to any certain characters because, if they die, it will hurt.

She doesn’t want to get her hopes up on a certain romance for fear that it won’t come about, or that the couple will end up divorced or separated.

The bottom line is that she wants to protect herself emotionally by knowing what the future of the book holds.

And when she puts it that way……well…..I kind of get it.

Wouldn’t we all like to read the end of the book of our lives? I mean, if we could Google what was going to happen to us, wouldn’t most of us take advantage?

What if we could simply say, “Hey Siri! Who am I going to marry? Is my difficult marriage going work out or will we end up divorced?”

“Alexa……how is my career going to work out? Am I going to be rich and famous or poor and destitute?”

Or if we could enter a prompt into ChatGPT and ask it when we’re going to die and how?

Who among us would not be tempted to find those things out if they were available to us?

Because our lives are one big story…….a giant book…….and the truth is, we get stuck in our current chapters.

Don’t we?

When the chapter we’re in is difficult, painful, or discouraging, we start to believe that that chapter will go on forever. We forget that it ends, and a new chapter begins.

I mean, a big part of what creates anxiety is that we can’t read the end of our book. We want to…….we believe we NEED to……and yet we can’t. So, anxiety begins to anticipate all the endings that COULD be; mostly the most horrible of endings, if we’re being honest. Lol 

I mean, anxiety rarely writes happy endings. Usually, anxiety looks ahead and sees a horror story. It triggers our amygdala and finds threats whether they are there or not.

Depression activates our emotional Eeyore. Really, depression prevents us from seeing anything outside of the page we’re on, let alone beyond the chapter.

We could go on and on.

Our lives are stories, and until we come to the end of this life, or God calls us home, we continually write them.

You are writing yours right now. This very day. This moment. Even as you read this sentence, you are in the middle of your story.

I want you to see that as hopeful; that no matter how difficult things are for you right now, that it’s just a chapter….not the end of the story. That sometimes, all it takes is the turn of a page and life can begin to change in ways we never expected. That you could go from conflict and tension on one chapter to a chapter that is full of hope and success.

And that can happen. It happens all the time to people. In the words of Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over til it’s over” and that applies to the book of your life.

I wish that we could look ahead at the later chapters of life. I really do. Like my daughter, I wish there were a “Life Google” where I could see the obstacles that will come into my path and the ways I would overcome them. I long to look ahead to all the blessings and victories that my life will bring, so that it can offer me some tangible hope NOW.

Instead, I get stuck in the chapter I’m in, and it often feels like the only chapter that will ever be.

But I would challenge you to remember, first of all, that the chapter you’re in is not your first chapter. You may be in a tough part of your story but, for some of you, the earlier chapters were filled with laughter and joy. Remember those. Realize that the fact that they exist points to the possibility of future chapters being filled with the same.

But for some of you…..well……none of the chapters that came before having been joyful at all. Many of you have endured a lot of chapters filled with trauma and sadness; grief and sorrow; deprivation and despair. For some of you, the book really has been more like a Stephen King novel than Pollyana.

For all of you, I would encourage you to remember that the story is not over. It’s not. There are many chapters for you to write, and they don’t have to be like the ones before. We may not be able to sneak a peek at the ending of our own book, but we can look at the lives of so many whose later chapters outshone the early ones.

We could point to Abraham Lincoln who grew up in poverty and who experienced multiple losses and failures before becoming one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States.

What about Walt Disney? Before he enjoyed the blessings of the “Mouse” he endured financial failures (even bankruptcy), personal rejections and the constant scrutiny of those who told him his ideas were bound to fail.

Or even Rocky himself…..Sylvester Stallone. Before that iconic character, he often slept in bus stations and once had to sell his dog because he couldn’t afford to feed him. And yet, he later became one of the most influential actors in Hollywood.

You get the point.

Your story is not over until life ends and you must put the pencil down.

We can’t look ahead to our chapters, but we can make sure we don’t get stuck in our chapters.

Maybe that’s part of the beauty of stories after all. We don’t get to skip ahead because the chapters we have not yet read still matter. The people we have not yet met matter. The healing we have not yet experienced matters. The victories, surprises, reconciliations, and unexpected joys hidden in later pages matter too. And if we rush to the ending, we may miss the very things that would have changed us along the way.

So if you find yourself in a difficult chapter right now, don’t assume you already know how the story ends. Some of the most beautiful parts of life are written after the chapters where we nearly gave up. Keep turning the page. Your story is still being written.