Day 2610 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Lamentations 3:26 NIV

. . . . . . . .Waiting. . . . . . . . Good Friday gets a fair amount of attention. Easter Sunday is obviously the big celebration. But the Saturday in between doesn't get much fanfare. It's sort of just this day of patiently waiting. A quiet day of hope. A day in between what seems in all reality to be the end, and yet this hope that it really is only the beginning. The Saturday between may not seem as important, but that's definitely not the case!

Yesterday marked the start of the culmination of what Christ came to this earth to do. To take our place. To bear our sins. To atone for our mistakes. To open our eyes to the cost of our living carelessly. To wake us up, tear the curtain, and let us see that this life isn't just a game that we can afford to play around with. Good Friday is the reminder that we don't get to make the rules up as we go. God has set in stone the difference between right and wrong, and the penalty of walking on the wrong side of that is more than we can endure.

Tomorrow we celebrate the grand finale. The day that proves that Christ really is who He says He is. Easter Sunday marks the start of our new lives following Christ rather than the old messed up priorities that we used to live by. It’s the day that our faith is validated and given its worth through a stone rolled away and an empty tomb left behind. It’s the day that we’ve all hoped for. The day that we’re given a new hope in something bigger than we can imagine. The day that we finally see that salvation is real because Christ is alive and through His victory over death, you and I too have the chance to overcome.

But again, there’s this Saturday kind of just dangling in the middle. Easy to overlook as we reflect on the events celebrated yesterday and get excited for the party tomorrow. But as easy as it is to overlook those middle parts, they’re the ones that have some of the most important aspects. You see, today is the day where we learn how much our faith means. We learn the importance of trust. We learn the difficulty of waiting. We experience this strange feeling of hope mixed with confusion and little dab of uncertainty. Friends, that’s what faith is!

It’s this feeling of hoping that we’re not wrong. It’s this sense of not really knowing what’s to come. It’s this time of being forced to cling to something outside of ourselves. It’s a moment of waiting on something that we can in no way control. It’s uncomfortable. It’s unsettling. It’s nerve-wracking. But it’s oh so necessary. It’s in this Saturday between that we’re forced to wait for God. We’re forced to cling to our faith during these moments of uncertainty. We’re given no other option than waiting patiently with this hope that He is who He claims to be.

We can’t overlook that. We can’t skip through it while trying to hurry toward the finish line. We need these in between days where we simply have to wait. Definitely not something that we’re inherently good at doing! We want that instant gratification of knowing we were right. We want the instant results that verify we made the right choice. We want to jump straight to the finish line where we get the trophy, but don’t necessarily want to put in the time to get there. We’re truly an impatient bunch!

But that’s why these days like today are so important. They help us learn to slow down and take it all in. They encourage us to wait patiently knowing that what’s to come is worth the wait. These in between days are where our faith grows. Learning to trust God when it seems like nothing is happening. Learning to lean on hope in something we can’t control or speed up. Learning that God’s timing is different from ours, and for good reason. Patience helps us put the spotlight on God when we’d normally keep it on ourselves.

Don’t rush through things that require you to wait. Waiting may seem like some form of punishment to us, but it’s in the waiting that we learn. It’s in the waiting that we grow. It’s in these times between big events that life happens. Easter weekend isn’t just a Friday of sorrow and a Sunday of celebration. It’s a process of enduring. It’s a story of patient hope. It’s a time of completely surrendering our ways of doing things and letting God do what needs to be done.

It’s good for us to have to slow down. To stop. To wait. To hope. Because those things are absolutely vital in our faith. We don’t get to skip to the last page. We have to live the whole story. We don’t get to speed through the hard times or slow down the good days so they last longer. We’ve been given these lives and we ought to squeeze every ounce of opportunity that we can from them. The waiting and being patient may not be our favorite parts, but they couldn’t be more important because they’re where our faith and trust are put to the test.

And without being tested, we’ll never fully know what faith really is. So learn to trust God. Learn to lean into Him when nothing makes sense. Learn to have patience in life because sometimes slowing down lets us see more of what’s happening around us, and more importantly, to feel what’s happening inside of us.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold