Even If Not

I like closure.

I like neat endings and explanations, where everything is rightfully resolved in the way that I expect.  When I think of closure, I like to think of wrongs being righted, sufferings being addressed, reasons being given, and bows tied neatly on all the whys and wherefores.

And sometimes you get it.  When my boyfriend dumped me in the first year of college to party with friends and visit strip clubs, the consequences of those and later choices became rapidly visible to me and to everyone else.  “Ah,” I said to myself, after not even a year had passed, “dodged a real bullet there.”  Something bad happened, and subsequent events both made sense of it for me and made me glad that it had happened after all.

But more often than not, closure doesn’t come.

A supervisor treats you terribly; you’re able to move into another position, but as far as you’re aware she suffers no consequences for her behavior.  In fact, she continues to publicly behave in the same ways, and she’s rewarded.  Someone hits your car in the parking lot and doesn’t leave a note.  A child makes a horrible choice, and it isn’t clear the extent to which the consequences might transform their future. A loved one dies suddenly.  A boyfriend or girlfriend leaves.  A friendship takes a cold turn for reasons you don’t understand and can never discern.

It is human to seek reasons, explanations, and reparation.  The relationship ends and we pore over our actions and conversations to find out why, or maybe even waste energy making phone calls to that ex and having conversations to make peace with what happened.  We seek justice for the cruel supervisor, counting the days until a downfall that never comes.  We break our necks trying to soften consequences for a child, or trying to reach out to the friend that disappeared.

Just tell me why.  Just explain.  Just let me fix it.  Just let the right thing happen.

I’ve been struggling lately wanting closure myself.  I was right in my instinct earlier this year that God is instigating a lot of change in my life.  The change is not bad, even if it may be transformative; I just find myself frustrated there is no closure with it.  It is as though God has granted me a clear exit from a house on fire, and even as I walk through it I keep turning back to look over my shoulder: but are you going to put out the fire?  What’s going to happen to the person who started it?  What if the building burns down?

At these times, I find myself thinking about 1 Samuel 31:2:

The Philistines were in hot pursuit of Saul and his sons, and they killed his sons Jonathan, Abinadab and Malki-Shua.   

For my money, this is one of the saddest verses in Scripture.  We know that Saul is a sinful and arrogant man, but his son Jonathan is lionhearted: devoted to David and to his God, willing to sacrifice his own right to rule for his friend who has been chosen, willing to bear the brunt of Saul’s wrath to save David’s life.  There is no King David without Jonathan—and yet he is slaughtered alongside his father, ignobly and wretchedly. That David can only respond in lament seems fitting.  The story doesn’t end the way we wish it would.  And we don’t really know why it has to be that way, only that it is.

So very many stories don’t end the way we wish they would.  And we still don’t know why it has to be that way, only that they have.

I collect little inspirational stories and quotes in a file that I glance at from time to time to buoy my spirit.  One of them is a riff on Daniel 3:18: it says “even if not” on a little field of flowers.  In the original verse, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego are threatened with death for refusing to bow to an idol; they claim that God will save them from death, but “even if not” they will not bow.

What a palms-open concept: that obedience is required and God is good regardless of what happens or does not happen.  That we don’t need to know.  That the circumstances of the moment are in some ways irrelevant.  Whether it ends good or it ends badly, whether we understand why or not, whether we can make sense of it or not, whether we can fix it or not: none of these things really matter if we believe that God is good, and if we know what we are to do.

God Himself is the closure we are provided.

And that is the most difficult thing of all, because we don’t really know what He’s going to do and if it’s going to be what we want Him to do.  When someone acts cruelly, we want to see them smited or groveling for forgiveness.  When someone abandons us or walks away, we want an explanation if not an apology.  When things fall apart, we want the promise that it is fixable.  We receive none of these things.

We receive God instead.

And we rely on what we know: that God is merciful, and God is good, and God is also just.  We know what He intends to do at the end of all things, and what He intends for redemption, and we know His incarnate presence in His Son.  We know what love looks like when it takes on flesh and walks around.  We know what the Spirit quickens us to do.

That is all.  And that’s enough.

Even at the times we understand the least.