Episode 125 - Happy Ever After Doesn't Happen Here: An Easter Reflection

It can feel like life is just one thing after another—when will it finally all work out? Why does it never seem to settle down the way we expect? This Easter, we’re reminded that our “happy ever after” isn’t here—and that changes everything. 

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk and Happy Easter Happy Easter Sunday. In this octave of Easter, the Church gives us eight days of Easter Sunday. We are an Easter people, and for us, happy ever after doesn't happen here, right? Happy ever after happens when we get to heaven, and that's what we're going to talk about today. But before we do that, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit, amen, Heavenly Father. We, thank you for this day. We, thank you for all the ways that you love and bless us Lord. We, thank you for the gift of your suffering, your death and your resurrection. Lord, You've done the hard part for us. Thank you for constantly drawing closer to us. Lord, you close that distance. You're constantly closing the distance between you and us because you want us close. Allow us to draw near to you, Lord, bless us. Lord, whatever situation we find ourselves in, let us remember that you have an awesome plan for us, and it results in us living with you in heaven forever. Strengthen us in this day. We ask all this in Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So happy ever after doesn't happen here. It happens in heaven. And Easter proves that that is real. As I was praying to as I was praying and thinking about what I was going to talk about this week, I knew I wanted to talk about Easter and how great this gift is, right, the Lord's Passion, death, resurrection, how great that gift is for all of us, that we are an Easter people. And as I was thinking about this and praying about it, I was reminded, I think it was about a year ago. I may have shared this briefly on a episode about a year ago, but, but I went to adoration. So it was about a year ago. I'm an adoration and I I pulled out my laundry list, right? My to do list for the Lord. Lord, if you do this, everything will be good. If you do that, everything will be good, right? Am I talking to the right people? Does this resonate with you? See, life is hard, and it seems to be just one challenge after another challenge, and just as I get over one hill, I find that there is another one, and it's bigger than the last. And I think, I think we all experience this. So there I am in adoration. I'm praying, Lord, I need you to do this. I need you to do that. I need you this other thing. And in my mind, I'm thinking, Lord, if you do this, then everything will be good, then I'll have happy ever after. Lord, if you do this right, everything will be good. And Jesus, I felt him just speaking to me, and I felt the Lord said, Paul, you want happy ever after. And that doesn't happen here, that only happens in heaven. And I mean, think about it. Think about your own situation. I think of mine. I think back to mine, right? Let's go back to I'm a broke college kid at Rutgers University. I meet a wonderful girl. We get married, right? If this was a movie, that'd be the end, right? That would be the start of happy ever after. Was it for me? I mean, very momentarily, but no, it wasn't happy ever after, forever, right? A couple years into being married, we, we wanted a baby, and we couldn't get pregnant. A lot of trying, a lot of prayers, doctor visits, specialists, more prayers. We I remember we attended a healing service, and then we were pregnant. One of the best days of my life was that happy ever after, no, no. Just nine months later, failed induction C section, medical bills. We want Taran to be able to stay home with the baby. Now it's a quest find a new job, better income, better benefits, better career opportunity. Hooray, hooray. I found a new job that solved all of those right? Is that happy ever after? No, it wasn't expecting baby too. We need to find a home. We were asked. We were asked to leave the apartment we're staying in, so we're looking for a home. Hooray, we found a home. Was that happy? Ever After? No, we bought a house. Mortgage is too big. I've spoken about this. Our debt to income was astronomical. It was like over 50% debt to income. So the mortgage is too big. More babies come. We get busier. Life gets more expensive, longer hours, debt starts to rack up, work becomes too much. 50 hours a week, plus I'm not home at night for dinner. I need to find a new job to better support my family, to better support our family life, because now at that point, we had three kids, hooray. I find a new job, a better schedule, more pay. Was that happy ever after? No. Then comes baby. Four more bills, Catholic school tuition, more debt, drowning in debt, tons of payments. We need to figure out a plan. We learn how to handle money. We learn how to work together. We start budgeting. We start paying off debt. Income starts to go up, it feels like a huge blessing. Was that happy ever after, no no expecting baby number five, we outgrow the house. I'm doing air quotes. I argue you can never really outgrow your house, but, but Taryn said we needed more than one tiny bathroom with seven people in the house and growing children. So now we're on another quest. Finish paying off consumer debt, then we want to find a new home. So yeah, we pay off the consumer debt we find a new home. Yay. Is that happy ever after? No, no expecting baby six, attacking the mortgage. Baby six is born, then covid hits. What now? Then my dad, who was already dealing with some dementia and a failing mind, it starts to get more aggressive. We have to move them out of their home. This all during covid, it was so hard to try to sell a house, empty a house, and move. Parents had to come live with us for six months while we tried to find a new home for them. Find a new home for them. But then dad has to go in the hospital. The change was just too much. My mom couldn't care for him anymore. He goes into the hospital during covid. We aren't able to visit him for six months. We finally get to visit him. But life gets very complicated. He bounces around for a few months trying to, you know, nursing homes, kicking him out, trying them out, kicking him out, having to go to another place until finding one that will accept him. And as we're working on that, we finally find a place that accepts him, and the Lord lines everything up for me to leave my job at the bank and start my own business, right? Great flexibility. Is that happy ever after? No. Shortly after that, we find out we're expecting baby number seven, and then about three months into the pregnancy, we have a miscarriage. And we also experience other challenges, financial challenges, those that come from owning your own business. Health care costs, children getting older, big kid challenges aging parents. Then, 15 months ago, my father passed away. I mean, I should say he went home to glory, right? Happy ever after for him, but not for me, not for us, still here, challenge after challenge, always wanting a break, wanting to just hit a moment, to coast a little bit, to not have to climb. But that's not how life works. Wave after wave after wave. We want a calm sea. We want happy ever after our our heart longs for that, but that only comes at the end of the story for us if we know love and serve the Lord right here on Earth, are happy ever after, it will come at the end of this life, but it will be the beginning of a perfect eternity. But in the meantime, we must love and serve the Lord and each other and and we continue to run over and over and over to the Lord with new challenges every day. But that's what these challenges are. They're gifts. They're actually gifts. They're opportunities for us to be reminded of our need for the Lord and to draw closer to Him this past Christmas. So Christmas of 2025 on the Sunday after Christmas, which every year it's the Feast of the Holy Family. A good friend of ours. He's actually Taryn spiritual director and my spiritual director, our good friend, Father John. So as a gift to our family, that Sunday, he came and said a private mass for us at our home, and then he took us into New York City for the day to see Rockefeller Center and the tree and go to St Patrick's. We did our pilgrimage to the the Holy Doors for the Jubilee year. But during that mass at our house, he gave us a beautiful homily. And the line, he kind of started with it ended with it repeated throughout. This was the line, when we want what God wants, it's going to happen. Let me say that again, when we want What God wants is going to happen. And since then, I wrote that in my journal a couple times, my prayer journal, and I've prayed it and I've pondered it and and I think Father John is 100% accurate, because in the moment, right, in our everyday moments, with these challenges, we want what we think we want, right? What are those things we we ask the Lord for right ease. We ask for pain free. We ask for success, right? If you think of all those things you've brought to the Lord, ease, pain, free, success, but all the time the Lord wants communion with us, right? He wants unity, closeness with us. He wants us to draw near to Him and when, when we understand that, when our perspective shifts, when we recognize the Lord's calling us near in the midst of that challenge, that's when we realize what we actually want. We don't want ease, we don't want pain free. We don't even want success. We want union with our Heavenly Father. We want heaven. We want happy ever after and for now. Close to the closeness to the Lord, is what satisfies us, is it's what continues to strengthen us, right? It urges us onward, to get closer and closer and closer to him. And once we recognize that, once we desire, that once we once when we want what God wants, it does happen. Nothing changes, but everything changes. And this is the promise of Easter. This is the hope that we have through Christ's suffering, through His death and resurrection. This is our hope. This is our happy ever after to be in communion with the Lord, in unity with the Trinity forever. It is why we were created. But life gets hard, and we have to remember this. I am being constantly reminded of this recently a very good friend of ours, an older couple there. They're like my second parents. He's 80 years old. For the past, I don't know, six or seven weeks now, he's in and out of the hospital, several ambulance trips to the hospital, one thing after another. For every step forward, it feels like two steps back. And just the other day, I was speaking to them him on the phone, and he's just so down, so down, thoroughly exhausted. He's just done, just done. And he said to me, he says, Paul, it's just one thing after another. I don't understand why it is so hard. And you could hear it in his voice. He just wanted it to stop. He wanted things to finally be okay. He wanted to wake up and this all be over. And I told him, I said, John, we are all trying to get to heaven. That's our happy ever after. And I think this is why Easter matters so much. Because if this life is is all there is, then suffering. Suffering doesn't make sense. It's just frustrating. It's, it's unfair, it's, it's, it's just begs that question, why is this happening to me? But Easter changes everything. Jesus didn't come to remove suffering. He entered into it. He. Walk through it and he defeated it. There's a, and CS Lewis book, problem of pain, problem with pain. There's a, there's quotes. And I think it's George McDonald is one of the quotes he has in one of the beginning of the chapters. And it says, Christ didn't come and suffer so that man might not suffer, but that so man's suffering might be like his. So when we suffer, we experience suffering, and when we offer it up for others in particular, we're meeting the Lord at the cross. Right, the closest we can get to Christ here on Earth is at the cross, and we have to remember that the cross wasn't the end of the story, right? Direct the resurrection Easter proves there is more. You can't have an Easter Sunday without a Good Friday, and it's not always on our timeline, but it's always in God's plan. So what does this mean for us? And I think, I think there's, there's three things in here for us. The first is, this world is temporary. Anything of this world is temporary, the difficult situation you're in, the challenge you're currently facing, it's temporary, right? That stress, maybe the anxiety, maybe it's another mental strain, maybe it's a depression. It's all temporary, because it's of this world, and thank you, Jesus that it is right, the financial pressure, financial challenges, job loss, income loss, maybe your health situation, these are all very temporary. So this world is temporary. The things of this world are temporary. That's the first thing to keep in mind. The second one, and I'm going to say this just bluntly, stop expecting perfection here. I tell myself that right? My laundry list, my to do list, with the Lord of all the things I need him to take care of so that I can experience perfection. Here, we keep trying to build heaven on earth and and then we get frustrated when it doesn't work. We all know that, like, right? If we are of sound mind and we're actually, like, clear headed. We're like, Yeah, no, that's we can't build perfect heaven here on earth, right? Just look in the news. Look everywhere around you. It's people trying to build some type of heaven on earth. Other people are building hell on earth. But whatever it is, we get frustrated because when we try to build our little heaven here on earth, it doesn't work. We think if this, if this situation could just fix itself, if this could just go right, if that'll work out, then everything will finally be okay, right? That's what I deal with, and it won't, because the world was never meant to satisfy us, right? Heaven is communion with the Trinity. That's what's meant to satisfy us. So that's the second thing, stop expecting perfection here. And then the third thing, run to Him in everything, right? Run to God. Run to our Heavenly Father. Run to the arms of our Lord in everything, the Lord gives us moment after moment to remember our need for him. He constantly wants us to draw closer to Him. Remember what Father John said when we want what God wants, it's going to happen. So let's be about what God wants, closeness, unity, relationship with him. So we are an Easter people. That means we live with hope, not because everything's going to work out here, but because we know where we're going. Happy ever after doesn't happen here. It happens in heaven, and Easter is the proof that it's real. If Christ is not risen, then our faith is in vain, but he is risen, and that changes everything. Thank you, Jesus for the resurrection. So I hope this has been helpful. I hope. Hope this is an encouragement to you, particularly in the midst of this octave of Easter, this and then we get 50 days right of celebrating Easter. So I hope this is an encouragement to you. Thank you for joining me today. May you experience a new closeness to the Lord this Easter season. May God bless you peace. Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe in your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. You.