Resolution

I was always good at predicting when a TV show would end with those dreaded words, "To be continued...". It would get close to the end of the show, like the last 10 minutes, and I'd be thinking, "There's no way they can resolve this. They're not going to be able to save that girl/catch the bad guy/get the money; this story is going to carry into the next episode....NOOOOOooooo......!" And then came those three words. And the waiting.

I grew up learning that everything could be resolved by the end of the show, that resolution was the goal. You have a crisis/emergency/relationship issue; you attempt some heroic/absurdly ridiculous thing to solve it; it goes horribly wrong but somehow works out anyway and problem solved! Even when something was "to be continued", you still knew that it would be fixed by the end of the next episode. So I expected that same result in my own life.

Our culture has also adopted this view of resolution. I hear a lot about "closure" these days. "I just need closure". "This will give him closure." There is even a Need For Closure Scale.

Closure has been defined as "a desire for definite knowledge on some issue and the eschewal of confusion and ambiguity." And we expect that we will have closure for our issues. But sometimes we don't.

Sometimes we have to live with ambiguity. Someone dies before we can have that conversation. The person who hurt us can't explain why they did what they did. The good news we were waiting for gets lost in the busyness.

So, is life about getting closure? Should we be spending our time seeking resolution? Or is it more important to learn how to live in the meantime?

Everyone has questions they plan to ask God when they get to heaven. Things that, if they just knew the answer, then they would be satisfied. I think that when I get to that day, when I get the chance to have all of my why's answered, I'll realize that they don't really matter. That there are greater things to know. When Job goes through all of his suffering, he wants to know what he has done to deserve it. He wants to why. And God answers him. He says, "I am God and you are not." And that's all Job needs to know.