“Have you understood all these things?” They said to him, “Yes.” (Matthew 13:51)

In Kindergarten Bible school this weekend, the kids will find out what happened to Nate Saint. I’m doing a two-week missionary story on him. Last Sunday they heard about his life growing up, his love for planes, his invention to drop cargo from large canisters on the wings of the small planes he flew. And then the tentative and cautious contacts with the Auca people. Last week’s story ends in joy, as some of the Aucas receive gifts that kids could relate to—yo-yos, balloons and other toys. Relations between the small band of missionaries and the native tribe seem to be moving forward toward friendship.

The children wanted to know what happened next. I think some of them think they know—the Aucas will one by one trust Jesus and the missionaries and the Aucas will live together happily ever after.

I know what happens next and they’re about to find out. The end of the story isn’t just that Nate Saint dies, but that afterwards people come to faith. Many others, inspired by the sacrifice of these missionaries, enter missionary service themselves. What happens next is that Nate Saint is killed.

I am hesitant, though, and don’t want to tell the kids about the dying part. They seemed content with the story going well. They seemed happy to hear the good stuff. What happens next is sad and scary and wrong. I want to shield them, somehow, from the hard section of the story that seems not right.

This is not unlike Jesus dying on the cross. It’s terrible. The disciples go into hiding. Imagine all that was going on in Peter’s mind with his betrayal and Jesus’ arrest and death, and Jesus’ words about resurrection and life running through his mind along with images of Lazarus walking out of a tomb. Peter and the other disciples didn’t reassure each other with “Sunday’s coming,” I don’t think. They had to be besides themselves in grief and shock and wondering what to do next. Death and atonement had to come before resurrection and the Spirit to overcome sin.

I have been a Bible school teacher for most of my adult life. I’ve seen that shielding impulse repeated in a lot of curricula through the years. We easily skip over the hard parts. Most of the time it’s not the end of the story, but somewhere in the middle where things move into the shadows.

Joseph sold into slavery. The famines that drove his brothers to Egypt to ask for help. Elijah running for his life after he defeated the prophets of Baal. The prophets spoke to people who wouldn’t listen. Four hundred years of silence. Simeon waiting almost his whole life for that one day. The slaughter of the innocents. The martyrdom of Stephen, which is the end of him but the beginning of the church. The apostles sharing the good news and Christ using them in amazing ways before most faced deaths like what Jesus faced.

Being a Christian isn’t for wimps, but oftentimes, I feel like a wimp. I am not always ready to face that hard stuff or to tell little ones about it. And there’s something there, too, about perseverance—staying true to him on Wednesday, the traditional hump day of the week, or the errands of Saturday, Sunday after church and before the real first day of the week. Our small group is reading a book where the author says his family has “Tongue-Torched Thursdays,” when their not-so-tamed tongues lash out at one another. Our lives are filled with ordinary days where not much happens. Those are the days where the rubber meets the road. Probably for most of us, today is one of those days. This is the middle of the story, too. Not much is happening and yet everything is happening.

The story needs to get hard to be a good story, and we are in the midst of the best story ever. We are part of it. No, we don’t hide the hard stuff. It’s difficult for us to do it justice for our kids or for ourselves. We were wandering around the wilderness with our Kindergarteners for what seems like an eternity, it was really just a few weeks—not even a year, let alone forty, with an entire generation of people dying off before they could cross the Jordan River.

God is more patient and long-suffering than we are in the middle our own series of stories. He’s always faithful—with us in the middle days of ordinary life and ever-present with us in the hardest days ever.

We look back, but we also look ahead. As we celebrate the Lord’s Table this Sunday, let’s examine ourselves and consider the cup that Jesus drank for us. Let us also look ahead to the day when we are all together celebrating at the marriage table, the end of the story as the beginning of something altogether new.