Happily Ever After
Most Fairy Tales end with the phrase "And they lived happily ever after." I think this phrase sometimes gets misunderstood. We sometimes imagine this as "they lived, happy ever after." In other words, that they continued on in one uninterrupted state of perpetual happiness and they never experienced any hardship or struggle ever again. But this is not the phrase. It's not "they lived, happy ever after," but "they lived happily, ever after." It's not about being always happy all the time, but living happily. In other words, living after the manner of happiness. Living happily ever after does not mean that there are no sorrows, but rather that the joys stick out more sharply and more clearly than the sorrows. Living happily ever after does not mean we do not struggle, but rather that our victories outweigh our defeats. Living happily ever after means that our pleasures are sweeter than our pains. When we have an hours-long shouting match with our spouse but then arrive at a new, deeper level of understanding and intimacy and reconciliation, that is living happily ever after. When we stay up all night with a colicky baby until we're both bawling from sheer exhaustion but then we both somehow find the sweet embrace of sleep, that is living happily ever after. When we've beaten back cancer another week, that is living happily ever after. Living happily ever after means that on average our lives are happier than they are sad, sweeter than they are bitter, brighter than they are dark, lovelier than they are ugly. We can experience loss and pain and disappointment and yet still be living happily ever after. Just because we have pricked our finger on a spinning wheel or eaten a poisoned apple or found ourselves locked at the top of a tower or suffered some other temporary setback or momentary sadness does not mean we have been kicked out of our happily ever after. If there is one being in the universe that we can say without a trace of irony or a shadow of a doubt is living happily ever after, it is God. And in the midst of His happy ever after He has wept over the workmanship of His hands, witnessed with perfect clarity every horror and tragedy and depravity thought up in the darkest of minds and the most diabolical of hearts, and has sacrificed his Beloved and Only Begotten Son. If God can experience all of this and still honestly say that He is living happily ever after, then we can take our sips from the bitter cup and yet also live happily ever after. We can be occasionally unhappy and yet choose to live happily, trusting that if right now everything is not Ok, there will always and forever be an after in which happiness awaits us.
