I used to be a resurrection person.
I used to want to skip over the messiness of holy week—the betrayal, the trial, the torture.
I wanted the good news.
That was before I had really experienced the depth of what it means to be human. It was before I had experienced heartache and what felt like forsakenness. Before those experiences, I wanted tidy.
But redemption is messy. Jesus’ final days on earth were brutal. And this is now where I see the good news.
The good news is rooted in the darkness where God chose to join us and chooses to meet us still. The good news is that the darkness is not where Jesus’ story ended. The good news is our story won’t end there either.
As we walk through the painful parts of our lives, we move forward knowing new life will one day come. Redemption is not just a promise of the life after. It is available to us here and now. The little deaths we experience in this life are to be redeemed. Not necessarily with tidy endings, but eventually where God fills in the dark spaces and breathes in new beginnings.
I am still a resurrection person. But I no longer want to skip over the hard parts of Holy Week. We can’t skip over the hard parts of our own lives, nor should we. Instead, we feel them and trust in God’s grace to help us move forward.
We move forward with courage, knowing, that God is with us in the darkness. We move forward knowing, by God’s grace, redemption will one day come.
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