Life Ends with Tangled Wads and Loose Ends

For all our days pass away under your wrath;

    we bring our years to an end like a sigh.

The years of our life are seventy,

or even by reason of strength eighty;

yet their span is but toil and trouble;

    they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of your anger,

and your wrath according to the fear of you?

Psalm 90:9-11

This book is by the one who thought he'd 
be farther along by now, but he’s not.

Brennan Manning, All Is Grace

I have always tended to be unrealistic about life. As I wrote in my first Blog for The Christian Curmudgeon: "In the end the curmudgeon is something of an idealist, even romantic." I have tended to think that life is supposed to make sense and come to a satisfying conclusion. You live. During life you find there are a lot tangled balls and loose ends of strings. But you manage to untangle them all and pull them all together in a neat ball before you die. No strings are tangled, no strings are loose.

You have to think about such things when you have reached the threescore and ten mark of life and are bearing down on becoming threescore and one. The Psalmist tells us some by reason of strength attain fourscore years. You can look up the average life expectancy of an American male and find it is 78.74 (2014 figures). Neither of my parents attained 80; my father did not attain 70. My maternal grandparents made it past 80, my Papa reaching 84 and my Mamaw 90. 

But no matter how long we manage to live, Moses, in Psalm 90, as does the writer of Ecclesiastes, gives us a strong dose of reality reminding us that our days are lived under God's wrath, that is, the curse God visited on man and creation when Adam sinned. Then came thorns and thistles - frustrations to contend with in all our endeavors. Then came pain associated with childbearing. Then came the end of the comfortable relationship between man and woman. Then came death. We live our whole lives contending with these realities. "Their span is but toil and trouble."

None of us  knows when we will die, only that we certainly will. You can live your life with courage, and sometimes even optimism, and you can try to make the best use of your life, but still you die. You live, and then you die. Whatever the reality of your life at the time you die, whether it comes suddenly or after a slow decline, will be the unchangeable reality. You don't get the chance to untangle the wad or tie up all the loose ends. Even, if there were such a "chance," the effort would end in frustration because you lack the wisdom, skill, and power to untangle that tangled wad and tie those loose ends together. When your life ends, what is is.

When I look at the lives of many of my contemporaries, I see lives that make a lot more sense than mine. Looking at their growth in the Christian graces of holiness, righteousness, and love; their relationships with others whether family, friends, or colleagues; their service and usefulness to God, their lives are very different from mine. From my vantage point I don't see tangled wads or a lot of loose ends. Not that there aren't any. It appears that J.I. Packer is not going to leave us with the systematic theology he wanted to write, a great disappointment to those of us who are evangelical Anglicans. But the loose ends of such lives seem to have more to do with projects than their persons.

On the other hand, I ask myself, "What if I die with my life as it is now?" My life would not even resemble a ball of string with some loose ends. It would look like a wad of tangled and loose strings. It's a mess, and, if I die now, that is what it will be. I would not be the man I should be and want to be. I would not have the relationships I want to have. With regard to usefulness I would not be a green tree yet bearing fruit in old age. My epitaph might be the saying, "It is what it is."

So, how to live? A few brief thoughts on how for right now I deal with it. 

1. It doesn't make sense to me, but it does to God. God is not responsible for the sins and failures of my life that have brought me to the place that I am. But somehow this mess of tangled string and loose ends that is my life is part of his plan. I don't know how God does this. But, from the perspective of eternity, we will see that God was at work even in the messes his people can make of their lives. He will use it all for his glory, for the good of his church, and for the good of the person who is a mess and makes a mess.

2. Who knows but that God may yet untangle some of the tangled wad and yet bring together some of the loose ends? Things we cannot fix God can, and perhaps he will. I draw great comfort from one the sentences with which a minister may begin Morning Prayer: "Rend you hearts and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil" (Joel 2:13). He can "restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel 2:25). God is not obligated, but God can and often does in wrath remember mercy.

3. Even those who make messes, those whom Brennan Manning calls "ragamuffins," can live by grace. I found Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel much better than his Abba's Child (which left me considerably less enamored of him). The thing I think Manning gets right is that God the Father is like the father of the prodigal son, who is overjoyed at the sight of his returning son, who does not let the young man complete his speech of contrition, but embraces and kisses his son, bestows on him the gifts of sonship, and calls for a celebration. When we make messes and return to God, he will always forgive and restore us to his favor. His favor is not earned over time; it is gifted instantaneously. It boggles the mind, but  even the mess-up right now is as justified by God as is the greatest living saint.

4. We can rest assured that the day will come when God will untangle the wads and pull together the loose ends of our lives. God is going to fix everything. He is going to put everything right. Sin will be banished. Death will be destroyed. The curse will be turned to pure blessing. Then we "shall be what we should be; then we shall be what we  would be." The good that we would do, we will do, and the evil that we would not do, we will not do. Perfect love and friendship will reign through all eternity. In whatever ways God has for us to serve him in the eternal kingdom we will serve him faithfully and fully.

I wish I could say that by taking into a account these realities, I have it all together today. I don't. But these thoughts help.