Hard Endings is a four week teaching series accompanied by a four-week discussion and study guide for Growth Groups. Here is that guide:

We all experience endings in our lives. Some endings are happy endings while other endings are sad. But no matter what happens we must all deal with endings in our lives.

Sometimes we pray for healing but God takes them home
Sometimes we wish for reunion but the rift continues
Sometimes we hope to stay longer in a job but the contract ends and the retrenchment happens Sometimes we pray for the provision but nothing comes through
Sometimes we pray and wish for a successful business deal but it all ends in a loss

We want to write our own stories, we wish for certain endings. We love beautiful and amazing endings but there times if not a lot of them that things do not end with a beautiful story. There are a lot of times when things do not end with a “happily ever after” type of ending. We do not always get the endings we want. Most of our stories do remain unresolved. Maybe God has his own ending.

When we do not get the ending we want our hope must be in something bigger than our own happy ending, otherwise our faith isn’t really in God. Our hope must be in God. In fact our hope needs to be God himself.