Sitting in Saturday's Dark

It’s Saturday.

That awkward space that lies between the Friday when Jesus died, when we look at the Cross and all He experienced, and Sunday, when we celebrate joyfully His resurrection.

This day is my favorite. This is the day I need to reflect on perhaps more than any other. This is the day that challenges me.

Because this is the only day in all of history that Jesus didn’t breathe. This is the day that every hope was truly dead. This is the day that it looked impossible to redeem.

This is the day of waiting, the day that the disciples woke up and tried to figure out how to keep breathing when their hearts were shattered. And they couldn’t distract themselves with work or business; it was the Sabbath. They were left to their thoughts and their sorrow.

Where had they gone wrong? Where was God? Was this all that was left- broken dreams and a dead Messiah?

They had left everything, banked every hope on the man they watched die yesterday. Maybe they understood, maybe they knew what was coming.

But I don’t think so.

They were just human. They saw the man they believed to be God die. How can God die? Don’t you think they questioned their judgment, their belief that He was the one they had been waiting for? Maybe even that He was who He said He was? I would have. How could they not? He was dead and laying in a tomb. They saw the blood. They knew.

This day is dark and full of uncertainty, questions, and brokenness…but God planned it this way. I can’t say for sure why, but I have a suspicion. I think He knows that we need to learn how to wait. To lament. To learn to rely, to be stripped down. Friday was so emotional and I’m sure it seemed insane, but this was the day of emptiness. Of brokenness.

This is the day that tells me God is ok with the broken places. This day reminds me that God is ok with questions and aching hearts who are trying to understand. That God planned a day of waiting in the middle of the worst and best things, respectively, to ever happen on the earth, says that He is patient. There will never be a worse day for this world that the Saturday when Jesus lay dead in a grave 2016 years ago. This is the day that tells me over and over that nothing is beyond redemption. The One who planned all along to redeem the death of Jesus- perfect, both God and man, who wrapped the fullness of God’s character in flesh and bone- still redeems. So even when I am sitting in the dark, in places that haven’t seen redemption yet, I can wait in hope because this darkness is real, but it cannot compare to the light that is coming. That even though the death is real, the life that is coming with the dawn is what speaks the final word.

I don’t want to miss the wait.

Naturally, I hate waiting- especially for answers. I want to understand and I want it yesterday. I want to feel better. I want to move forward. But seasons of wait, just like the Saturday before Easter morn, stop me and remind me that my hope is not in the good that is coming, but the God who comes close and sits with us in the dark, in the silence, in the loss. He is ok to wait—the One who never has to wait, who created the very concept of time. He says waiting is good. He sent Jesus “at just the right time”, the Bible says. And He saw fit to leave a day between the death and the resurrection. There was a reason, and His Spirit whispers to me not to miss it.

So I will wait. Here, with Him, I will stay and remember and wait for the dawn to come.