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Why It's Okay To Read The Last Page First We find hope in knowing the ending by Sally Conroy I ruin stories for myself. I skip to the last page of the book, I ask whether the hero of the movie really dies, and I put it down if I find out that the story is going nowhere good. Like anyone who dares to do this in public, I get speech after speech about how I'm missing "the experience," the suspense of getting to the end and not knowing what's going to happen. From these friends' viewpoint, it ruins the story to go through the middle with assurance of what happens at the end. Call me crazy (or stubborn), but I think that any story worth telling only gets better when you know the ending. The best stories aren't necessarily the ones with the flashiest, most original endings. Instead, the best stories are the ones that may resolve well, but get to that resolution in a beautiful way. Think of your favorite movie. You know the ending. You've seen it more times than you can count, and you can probably quote your favorite parts (if you're like me, you could probably quote all of it). After the first time you've seen it, it doesn't surprise you anymore. But it still gets your heart racing in the final battle scene, or right before the guy finally tells the girl that he loves her. You know that everything is going to be alright in the end — that the good guy wins. But instead of ruining the story, knowing the ending injects hope into the story. Most good stories include times when it looks absolutely impossible for the hero to get out of this one alive, but in those moments, you know, despite appearances, that things will be okay. The story is engaging enough, and it pulls your heart in close enough, that it doesn't matter that there's no real suspense. The truth is, suspense isn't enough to sustain a story. It's maybe enough to keep you interested through one reading or one telling. After you learn the ending, though, there's no point in hearing a suspense story again. If the whole point was to ask a question and to find the answer (Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the lead pipe, anyone?), your mind, not your heart, was engaged in the story. The stories you want to hear again and again aren't like that. And the Gospel isn't like that. If Jesus has saved you, you know the ending. We're going to pull through the battles here on Earth, not without scars, but whole, and stronger for it. We're going to get our "happily ever after" with Jesus, that permanence and solidity that we yearn for in our happiest moments now. We'll be better than alright, and better than any good we could imagine now, in the end. Knowing that, though, doesn't ruin the story. Instead, every story that catches our hearts does so because it gives us a tiny glimpse of that Story. In the love story, we see the sacrificial love of God echoed in the hero's unrelenting quest to free the heroine. In the action story, we see the hope of the Resurrection when the good guy conquers impossible odds and really does win in the end. The Gospel has no suspense to us anymore, not in the "will it turn out alright" sense. But it's the story our hearts pull after, the one we need to hear again and again, the one that makes it all make sense. Knowing what's in store for us doesn't "spoil" life. Instead, it gives us hope, even (and especially) in the worst times, that God is bringing everything to right. I'm not trying to say that people who give you speeches about spoiling the endings are wrong, or that they miss out on the Gospel. Instead, I'm trying to say that for those of us who need to know the ending, hope is not lost. Though maybe whodunit mysteries are.