I’m not asking how much you can accomplish on your first day of the weekend. How many chores or ball games. How much work or play you can squeeze into your day off.  This Saturday is the dark space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Between death and new life. Between reality as you knew it but can never experience again, and life as it will be.

Saturday is the place of death, of tears and loss and emptiness. Where hope does not glimmer around the edges. Nothing is like you thought it would be. Everything has come to a standstill.

How do you live through that long Saturday?

How do you climb through to glistening morning dew, faces you don’t recognize, but quicken your heart? A life you never planned to live?

We don’t get there by pretending it’s not dark.

That life before Friday didn’t matter all that much.

That it doesn’t hurt now.

Hollering in the graveyard may make small boys feel brave, but it can’t wake the dead.

And it won’t wake us.

We must wait. Live in the Saturday. Even if that living is slow motion, muted, arduous.

Until the sun rises.

I know some who have taken up residence in their Saturday. That’s no place to dwell.  If that is you, please, take my hand and walk with me toward the sunrise.

Leave your chrysalis and stretch out your wings.

Wait for the deeper reality, flowing through and behind.

When the time is right, we will fly.

“I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for. When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen. When you come looking for me, you’ll find me. Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.” God’s Decree.“I’ll turn things around for you. I’ll bring you back from all the countries into which I drove you”—God’s Decree—“bring you home to the place from which I sent you off into exile. You can count on it.” Jeremiah 29:11-14 The Message

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