Your Life— a Comedy or a Tragedy?

Our life is a story. Our life has a beginning, middle, and end, just like a story. So then, just like a story, our life too can be categorized as a tragedy or a comedy. 

What makes a story a tragedy or a comedy? Simply put, a tragedy is a story with a sad ending; a comedy is a story with a happy ending. A tragedy is not depressing throughout. The protagonist can have many happy moments. But these bright spots are eventually engulfed by the darkness of a tragic ending; the happy moments make the tragic end all the more heart-wrenching. “The brighter the sun (of happiness), the darker the shadow (of its loss)! In a tragedy, dark clouds of doom always hang over the happy moments in the story. 

In the same way, a comedy is not made up of only happy moments. It can have many instances of extreme hardship and adversity. But it's these dark moments that make the happy ending all the more satisfying and fulfilling. We may say that the dark clouds of doom can never quite blow away the positive glow of happiness, even through its darkest moments. 

We all want our life to be a comedy, not a tragedy. But how can we ensure that? We get all kinds of insurance to protect ourselves. The irony is that health insurance cannot guarantee our health. Nor can auto insurance keep accidents away. Life insurance cannot shield us from death. We don't know when or how our life will end. It's truly humbling to visit a cemetery and read the tombstones. Right next to a man who died at the ripe age of 97, you can find a child that died at the age of 2. We don't leave the world in the same order we came in. 

What constitutes a happy ending? Usually, a romantic comedy ends with a boy finally getting the girl of his dreams after much trouble. It can end with, “And they lived happily ever after.” But that’s the ending of a fairytale, not a real life. What would be a happy ending for the story of your life? 

But the stories of our lives all have the same ending. 

No matter which road we take in life and how different our life experiences may be, all our lives end at the same destination—death. Our life is a long (or not-so-long) march toward the grave. If so, can there be any happy ending to our life's story? Does the graveyard evoke a feeling of happiness and joy? Can our life be a comedy, ever, when it ends in death, which robs us of everything we have and cherish? What can be the postscript to our story other than, "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2)? 

We long for more than the years we manage to live in this world. Hoping against hope, we want death to be a comma that leads to eternity, not a period that ends our lives for good. Where does that longing for eternity come from? Is it no more than an illusion created by our overdeveloped brain, too smart for its own good, an evolutionary malfunction that needs to be corrected with the cold truth that we are nothing more than a cosmic accident and there's no meaning in life? 

What if our longing for eternity is not just wishful thinking? The Bible declares that God placed that longing in our souls when He made us in His image (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He gave us that longing because He made us for eternal life. He powerfully demonstrated the reality of this everlasting life through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For resurrection (unto eternal life) is not of this world, in which everything changes and eventually terminates in death. The bodily resurrection of Jesus testifies that death will not be the tragic end of our life. 

Jesus transforms our tragedy to a divine comedy. How? When Jesus suffered and died on the cross, He took the tragedy of our lives and died. But He did not remain in the grave. He rose again, having conquered sin and death! By His resurrection, He transformed forever the tragedy of our life into a wonderful comedy. If we trust what Jesus Christ has done for us, our lives, which re doomed to a tragic end in death, will be transformed into a “divine comedy,” whose eternal glow can never be dimmed by death or any suffering in this life! Put your trust in Jesus and His work for you and experience your life turn into a divine comedy, a life of eternal joy!