what happened to the happy ending?

In my English class we've been reading short stories. It's not a genra I'm particularly thrilled about, because it always seems kind of preachy to me. Like the only reason people write short stories is to make a very particular point. You don't get to explore a new world, or get to know the characters, or learn much about the author. You just get a message, and I don't like that as much.

But I have written short stories before, when I had to, and they were happy short stories with messages like, "Robin Hood was right to go against the king," or, "It's always better to obey your parents." Hahaha. I haven't written one in a long time.

These stories we're reading in English class arn't like that at all. They're always depressing. One was about a guy who's wife has a blind friend and he basically thinks his wife is in love with the friend but there's nothing he can do about it. So he lets the blind guy come over and even though he ends up really liking the blind guy, his marriage is never fixed. It's supposed to be this reflection on true blindness and sight, because the blind guy is more open minded and insightful than the guy who can see... but it bothers me that the marriage is never fixed. And more than that, there's just this tone about the way it's writen and the way their lives are described that makes it all seem so heavy, like this guy's life is totally not worth living but he keeps living it for some weird litterary reason.

And then we read a story about a couple who gets in a fight and ends up killing their baby. We read that one outloud in class. You could have heard a pin drop in the room, and all the gasps and horrified faces were a little bit redeeming- at least we're not that desensitized yet. But it was depressing. And the story had absolutely no hope- not even for other couples who could potentially learn a lesson from it. The point was, this is how all marriages will end. This is what love comes to, inevitably. So we might as well accept it.

I'm taking this in the inturpretation the English teacher gave it- I would have ascribed a lot more hope to it on my own. But my teacher insists the author didn't intend for that hope to be there.

It seems to me that in the end of the day the only point to most of these stories is to make you face the hard facts of reality. Now, I'm not saying all short stories are like this- but it's interesting that these are the kinds of stories that apparently reflect the very heart of American litterature, because that's what I'm reading in my American Litterature class.

And I think I'm beginning to understand why, because we read another story about a girl who's father wants her to write a normal story with a normal plot line, and she doesn't want to because she hates the plot line. She hates it because she thinks it leaves no hope. Like, the ending is decided from the beginning. Everyone deserves a chance to decide their own destiny, that sort of thing.

And we talked about how short stories don't have to follow the plot outline that a fantasy or a romance does. There's no rising action and no solution at the end. Just a climax. It's like, what if instead of writing the Lord of the Rings, Tolken just wrote a short story about two guys on a mountain, trying to find the inner strength to get rid of a ring that could potentially make them powerful. And then the mountain blows up. The end.

Which IS reality- things that happen in real life often don't have a plot line. Little things happen day in and day out that might be interesting to think about, but it would probably be very hard to write an interesting story with purpose spanning several years or even several weeks of our lives, unless we choose just one thing to focus on, like my job at such and such a place from start to finish... but even that usually isn't very interesting.

But to me, the plot line is full of hope. Way more hope than you'll ever get from a story without one.

As Donald Miller points out, world does have a plot line. From Creation (status quo) to the Fall (conflict) to Redemption (climax) to the end of the world. And come to think of it, individually our lives in Christ have something of a plot too. From our birth into sin, our salvation, our perseverence in the faith and finally our death, we make the story arc. Which is incredibly cool to me.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that as Christians we have the immense privilage of seeing things as a whole, on that broader perspective. Which enables us to always have hope, knowing that it's all going to mean something in the end. We don't have to look at life as these isolated incidents of random thoughtfulness. Everything that happens is part of a big story, an epic trillogy, as it were, not just a book filled with short stories to pick and choose from.

It really makes me want to jump up in the middle of class and start telling everyone about the hope and joy that is Christ. And it really makes me thankful for the way God has chosen to do things!