Just A Chapter

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” Revelation 21:4

Victor Hugo was a great writer who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the famous play- Les Miserables. He wrote thousands of other books and became so famous in France that one million people came to his funeral when he died. The city of Paris was almost renamed “Hugo” to honor him. He was very, very powerful and sold books all over the world which have been studied throughout the centuries. Someone asked him what book he would choose if all the books were destroyed and only one book could be saved for the human race. He answered, “I would choose the Book of Job.” They thought he would name one of his own books, but he said, “I would choose the book of Job because, at some point in life, every person finds themself in the book of Job. In life, there will be suffering, loss, and setbacks. God knew that this book would offer hope to people for endless generations.

Everything starts and ends with God. It’s truly a beautiful thing. When a person comes into the world, they inhale. Then, when they die, they exhale. Rabbis teach even breath has the name of God in it. Yah…weh. Yah…weh. Job took his last breath, and that little book of his story began to cover the globe through the millennium. How many people has he helped? How many times has he been quoted in messages around the world? He had no idea how far the shadow of his experience would reach. Here we stand 4,000 years later, still proclaiming the faithfulness of God amid life’s most severe trials because of a faithful man named Job.

Right when we think our story is ending, it is just beginning. The end of our life doesn’t end our impact on this world. Live your life knowing that hard times are just a chapter of your story. God has an eternal home waiting for you. C.S. Lewis once penned these words that can be found on the last page of the Chronicles of Narnia: 

"For us, this is the end of all the stories...But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world...had only been the cover and the title page: now, at last, they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever and in which every chapter is better than the one before." 

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