God makes no promises to redeem individual lives in their short life span; the promise is to redeem all of us over the long haul [all of humanity over all of history]. The way all this adds up, and works out, will seem strange to us, at the end. We don’t see this pattern at work now.. It is a storied pattern, to do with how lives are woven together in a fabric. That fabric woven in time has everlasting veracity and aliveness. It is what survives, when much folly and damage has faded away.
Mary’s life was ‘hidden in God.’ To an extent, this is true of most of us, because our life can seemingly end in despair, and real ruin, yet redemption remains on track, and even our abject failure, as we judge it over the span of our ‘individual’ existence, still is a necessary and contributing part of the warp and woof of that strangely beautiful fabric.
At the end, seeing the whole at last, we may judge our own life differently.