The Day After Good Friday

Today is the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I suppose it has an official name, but I don’t know what that is. But emotionally, spiritually, I think I’ve spent a lot of time here.

It is a day I face wearily, warily, after the drama of loss has receded, and a new day dawns cold and gray, utterly bereft. The life I had taken for granted is gone, never to be the same again. It is a wonder that planes still fly overhead, that people are driving around, hurrying, distracted, living everyday life with a thousand other things on their minds.

Auden’s poem about putting out the stars, dismantling the sun, pouring away the ocean and sweeping up the wood—“for nothing now can ever come to any good”—captures this day so well.

But Easter shows that these days are not the end of the story. Or rather, they don’t have to be, unless I choose them.

It’s possible to choose them. Do you remember the dwarfs in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle?

But eventually, after “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” come “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and “Up From the Grave He Arose.”

Thank You, Father, for not letting the story end on Saturday.

Thank you, Jesus, for Your obedience, even in humiliation, torture, and death.

Thank You, Spirit, for walking with me through my life’s own little Saturdays—even the ones I linger in for years—and for comforting me, for reminding me that the story doesn’t end on Saturday.