Choose Your Own Ending

Remember the days of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys create-your-own-ending books? My daughters were at the perfect age for these books when they first came out, and they loved them.

The idea was to read up to a certain critical point where the heroes/heroines had a choice to make, and then choose one way or another. At each juncture in the story road, the reader had to choose which direction to follow. For the obsessive, the book could be read a number of times, choosing different endings each time until the entire book was consumed.

As a writer, I certainly have many choices to make for my characters. Better to say, they have many choices to make as I set them up. Just recently, I was writing a scene where the lost person was found, but she refused to come home. The following day I re-read the scene and changed it. The lost person did come home, but it didn’t really bring her back.

As in reading, writing and life itself, we have many choices to make all along our journey through our specific storyline. These choices can make a night or day difference in the outcome.

As a Christ-follower, I have the blessing of the Spirit of Christ living in me, and He offers guidance in His still, small voice that I can choose to listen to or not. He knows the beginning from the end and exactly how each decision will affect the outcome. But He allows me to choose. When I choose a wrong or less desirable path, I may lose out on things, but because of His mercy, God always brings me back, through the detour, onto the road He has for me.

I find it such a relief and encouragement to know that God loves me so much that no matter how often I fail Him, as His child, I am the apple of His eye and He loves me enough to bring me through to the best ending for my life. And after that, the promise of eternity with Him.

Joshua 24:15

“…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”