All Good Things Must Come to an End

I’ve been listening to the proverbial old sayings that people employ quite often.  I find that I don’t have to listen for very long before someone comes forth with a maxim that’s supposed to be automatically accepted as truth.  One such saying is the one in the title of this post, “all good things must come to an end.”  Another such saying is, “when it rains, it pours.”  The interesting thing in so many of these commonly-employed sayings is that they’re basically negative in nature.  I keep hearing these universally-accepted “words of wisdom” that all have a negative bent to them!!!  Why is that?  What’s that say about us?

You could be downright cruel with the statement in the title of this post (attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer).  Someone could be telling you about something really good they’re enjoying these days and you could haul off and rain on their parade by reminding them not to get too excited because as everyone knows, all good things must come to an end.  Even if you do just turn the statement on yourself when something good in your life comes to an end (or seems to), it’s still pessimistic, pointing out the perceived inevitability of goodness always having a limited run.  What a lens through which to view life!

I suppose we adhere to a belief that this statement is true because we think about the certainty of death, which many think of as the coming to an end of a good thing (life on earth).  After all, as another one of those negative truisms goes, “nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

The part about the certainty of taxes isn’t in the Bible, but both the Old Testament and the New Testaments of the Bible would agree about the inevitability of death (Ecclesiastes 3:2, Hebrews 9:27).  But as far as death being the ultimate expression of “all good things must come to an end,” the New Testament, the gospel of Jesus, the resurrection celebrated at Easter, offers a different view.  That different perspective on all of life, giving a much more positive bent to this temporal life, is that for the person following Christ, all good things get even better.