Closure

Do you ever watch the Big Bang Theory?  The show was probably already in its third season before I had even heard of it.  I was grocery shopping one day and ran into colleagues from my previous job.  We chatted a while, and the conversation turned to this particular television show.  "You have to watch it," they said.  "Everyone in our department is a character in the show!"  Since then I've been hooked.

On a recent show, Sheldon's girlfriend, Amy, determines that he has an obsessive need for closure, and she determines to change him.  She starts a day of "therapy," depriving him of closure.  They play tic tac toe, and she erases the board before he can win.  She has him wind a Jack in the Box, and then takes it from him before Jack pops out.  He spends what I am sure was hours setting up a "falling dominos" structure (what are those called?) and then has him put the dominos back in the box before he starts the chain reaction.  And on and on.  He gets more and more angry with her.   He needs closure.

The devotion I read this morning is based on Hebrews 11:8-16.  The writer says, "While faithfully living out what we sense God calling us to in the present is a way of expressing our faith, trusting that we have not yet seen the end of the story is another."  (Beth Taulman Miller, Disciplines).

Do we remember that we are in the middle of the dominos falling?  That we are still playing the game?  That the music is still going?  We struggle to understand life and the path we are on, and yet sometimes we forget that we are in the middle of the story.  The curtain hasn't fallen, and God is still at work.  We may want closure, but it's just not time.  We are in the middle of the journey.

(And I won't tell you how the Big Bang Theory show ends -- you'll just have to wait).