I read an article this weekend,
it spoke to the fact of how we mourn the events of Friday, Good Friday, the
suffering and death of Christ, how He was buried in a tomb. This article also spoke to how we rejoice to
the outcome of Sunday, Easter Sunday, the joy of Christ alive, He lives! But, what the article was really speaking to
was Saturday, the day in between, the day where Christ lay in the tomb,
waiting; the day where His friends
suffered His loss, were filled with confusion, uncertainty, doubts, loss of
purpose and questions…so many questions.
Friends of Jesus, hearts and
souls filled with hard questions; the questions that happened before the hope
of Sunday, not knowing that they were waiting…just knowing loss of their hope.
This article went so far as to
say that as Christians we live our lives as if we are always in the
Saturday…forever waiting, overcome with questions, as if our hope is gone.
Do you think so?
I think as
Christians we know where our hope lies, and it is in the Sunday; alive in
Him. Even so, I think we often find it
difficult to apply this hope to our everyday walking about lives and we suffer
in our circumstances, we are overloaded with the questions…questions that trip
us up on our path as we go. We want
answers that will clear up our suffering and loss of purpose, answers to our
Saturday questions.
What do we do with those
Saturdays, those days filled with the uncertainty, those days weighed down with
confusion, overcome with loss…those days where our questions seem to go
unanswered? What do we do with the
Saturdays that leave us with feelings of loss, loss of purpose, loss of
life…loss of hope?
This is what we do, we pick up
the questions, the ones we don’t understand and we carry them in our hands,
feeling them, turning them over again and again, throwing some away, tossing
them to the edges of our path. And
others…we carry them like stones, waiting for Sunday, like a comfort…blessings
in disguise.
I know my Saturday and I am
carrying those questions like stones, rolling them over in my hands…some I have
thrown away, some, their answers too personal even though I hold on to them,, others I hold gently but surely, my hope and my certainty; my questions are blessings
in disguise.
The article I was reading, adapted from the book 'A Glorious Dark: Finding Hope in the Tension Between Belief and Experience' ended with this:
"We didn’t anticipate those
dark moments of questions and waiting, they are nonetheless holy moments. Faith
isn’t just Good Friday and Easter Sunday; faith is awkward Saturday too. "
AJ Swoboda
I love that.
I am carrying my questions like
stones.
