It's Friday...

I’ve got pork in my crock pot for Easter brunch which is fairly optimistic, considering the sick little boy I have tucked into my bed upstairs. There’s been a lot of sick around here lately. The kids have been passing some bug back and forth, and I’ve been battling some ever present health issues. Which makes it sound like I’ve got my feet firmly planted, a shining weapon in my hand, and a Clint Eastwood-esque grin on my face. I’d love that. In reality health issues are more of a long, wartime march through hostile landscapes with paltry rations and shoes that don’t quite fit. More Frodo, less Dirty Harry. But my march is starting to wrap up, I think. And as I laid next to my feverish little guy tonight, I thought of the phrase “it’s always darkest just before the dawn.”

That feels like a way to stay hopeful in the middle of the biggest battle, or longest march - like if it’s this bad, it must be getting better soon. But it’s kind of an empty promise, because how do you really know this is as dark as it’s gonna get? When you feel like you can’t convince a kid to take one more spoonful of medicine, you can’t write one more word, you can’t haul yourself out of bed one more time, you can’t tell your daughter to stop putting her hands in your other kids pockets and falling on the ground so her sister will drag her around like a zombie... or maybe that last one’s just me... you assume dawn’s coming.

Tomorrow Christendom celebrates the brightest dawn we’ve ever known. But the way we say it is, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.” And it helps me to remember the guys who just saw their best friend and brightest hope torn to shreds and mocked and killed ein front of everyone that mattered. It helps to remember that they must have felt absolute grief, mixed with fear, mixed with despair. And despite being told, they didn’t get that Sunday was coming. And when it did, it was spectacular.

He is Risen.