Day 3324 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 27:14 NIV

Almost as if caught in the aftermath of a whirlwind, it seems that both much of life and all but all of faith is found and felt within the in between.

For that is where such things as faith and hope and trust and even truth are allowed their best growth as all the above need a great amount of patience in order to produce the harvest for which they’ve been sown into these souls on loan. Yes, God has given us a great many things, memories as well as the many moments between them, and the lot all collect into a story that we’ve the opportunity to live and breathe and become in light of what His will has done.

Yes, such is the celebration of this weekend, a reflection of that three-day set of salvation’s achievement accomplished so many years ago.

It’s the time of the year when we few who find life in faith gather to remember what’s been done for us to have such faith in life. An annual retelling of tales of both turmoil and yet still triumph over it in the most impossible of ways. It’s a yearly rehashing of our years spent since thrashing and trashing all that’s now tarnished and transient. Indeed, this weekend is perhaps the greatest among all the rest as it’s the culmination of our capitulation from lives lost to confusion’s condemnation.

Such is salvation, the chance to change the choice we chose and to choose now the choice that we simply shouldn’t have the chance to change.

It’s an impossibly immense gravity, this grace we celebrate at Easter. The calamity of Good Friday displaying the darkness of the death and danger we’ve all but demanded from inside lives lived by desire and the depravity which is thus demanded in order to obtain what we’ve never needed. Yesterday marked the reminder of the cost, the life that was lost, the heaviness of our hatred and the humility of His path which welcomed it in the fullest measure we might have to offer.

Christ on the cross defines the penalty of our sins as in Him we see clearly the debt we’d accumulated. The stripes and scars which bent the bars that set captives free were all taken not by you and me but instead by the One who is flawless, the only One unlike our lawless. Yes, God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for the many who knew such depravity far too well so that, in the great exchange of such currency as eternity, you and I might now hope in taking His place as He’s now died in ours.

Death is indeed a very monumental outcome, one which awaits us all. It’s the great fear of many, perhaps most in some way. The grand finale to life’s opportunity, a closing door that reality, that logic, that society as lost inside the sad semblance of both has come to believe simply the end. And so we find that the Good Friday of yesterday was the beginning of something truly radical in terms of reality as a man lost His life in the most grueling and gruesome of ways.

And still tomorrow is to bring about the fulfillment of this most faithful experience when we gather again to rejoice in that empty tomb proving not enough room to withhold the One who held us and holds us and allows us then to hope in more than what we assume we know of life, of death, of here and now of home. Yes, Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday marks the miracle of new life springing forth from the assumed finality of death.

Two very big things, life and death, both split apart by what must have been a rather bleak in between back then.

And perhaps the same remains even for us here today struggling as we so often do to wrap our minds around the majesty of miracle and message and meaning and Messiah and the maybe of it all. Yes, maybe you and I find ourselves more akin with this strange Saturday than we do either the death of the day before or the hope beheld by tomorrow. Maybe we still look a little too much at only what we see, what’s been seen, never then quite able to see what might be.

Indeed, I think that much of life is more of this mundane here in between moments and memories.

Which is why we need it as much as the before or the after. Because this point in the middle marks the myriad of moments in which things such a patience and belief and trust and courage all combine into a kind of growth not offered by the bigger aspects of life. And yet we miss that more often than not. We miss the miracles of the ordinary, of the small, of the rather insignificant. All because we’ve become a bit too much like the belief-less world in which we walk and seem to assume that life means most inside only the celebration worthy.

But in truth there are quite few moments as such, those large enough to be remembered, to be marked as days fit for special notations on calendars that help plan parties and remind ahead of time the specific specialty of the moment. No, truth is that the vast majority of life is lived in between those monumental moments. In fact, I dare say that all of faith is a matter of everything but the monumental as such stands so obvious that it demands no faith from us.

Yes, I do indeed believe that faith is found when there’s nothing to see, little to hear, almost nothing felt as inside those many moments of such near stagnancy we find the seed of belief that allows us to bridge the gaps caused by life’s normality. It’s as if the in between allows us the best time to reflect, to remember, to imagine, to invite inside a kind of trust that simply has no reason to believe other than simply wishing to do so.

That’s the often unseen beauty of this Saturday without its own well-known moniker such as shared by both Good Friday and Easter Sunday. No, this little Saturday is just the weird, the wild, the normal, the mundane, the uncertain, the unseen, the unknown, the under-appreciated.

Because you see, this day deserves just as much celebration as the day before and day still to come, should tomorrow do as we tend to expect. This is the day which perhaps best defines the faith of those who had known Christ, who had walked and talked with this Savior they came to know as both friend and Father, who watched on as He did as He told them He would. Yes, this is the day when all they knew was that He was now dead, locked behind a tomb sealed with a round stone not seeming ready to start rolling.

No, that is much of life. Stones stuck in place. Prayers apparently unheard as nothing seems to happen in the time or way we so often want to expect. Movements and memories not coming in the same rapidity of the rigidity of life’s struggle and strife. No, much of life, all of faith is a matter of waiting, of trusting, of hoping not merely when there’s little reason to but when there is no reason to. For indeed, much of life and all of faith exists within the unseen, unknown, uncertain and impossible.

But is that not when belief can grow best? Does not our trust blossom in newfound ways when we’ve left no reason to choose it other than our wanting to believe beyond what we see? Indeed, isn’t hope a matter meant for the horizon, a cherished assurance we know can’t be proven until we’re elsewhere? For what is hope, or faith, or trust, or belief, yes, what is life itself if all of it is held inside the seen and sure? And if such is the case as many seem to believe in this place, well then, why should any reach for Heaven’s shore?

If not for the insistence upon the impossible?

That’s what Christ came to show us, that we’ve absolutely no idea as to what’s possible and what isn’t. That we may have convinced ourselves of a great many things, but that the lot of them was nothing but a misplaced assumption assuming we knew and know what we’re doing. That we can now take all such assumption and set it on fire, cast it upon the sea, show it to the door or do whatever one might imagine as our assumptions are no longer fit for consumption on this side of that cross.

No, today is the day we cross that line. It’s the day in which faith takes on a whole new meaning as we sit inside the uncertainty waiting to see if He is who He claimed to be. Will yesterday prove as most contend, just His end? Will the third day be the celebratory hope we’ve come to believe? Will our belief in this world being wrong and our faith being justified tomorrow even make it to tomorrow?

For that is the personal gravity of God’s grace, that we must choose just how tightly we hold to hope amidst a lifetime of reasons not to.

I would imagine those faithful felt the same uncertainty as they waited through that day in between so long ago. Must have felt like a lifetime, one of those days in which minutes turn to hours, and yet because of hope’s anticipation, hours fly by as if seconds straining toward finding out what faith can only imagine. Alas, such is the necessity of this patience that this in between is supposed to bring. It teaches us to do as this verse asks of us:

To wait on the Lord.

To let our faith be strong, to let our hearts take heart, to insist our courage stay the course and allow it to unfold within the will of He who wrote it this way. Yes, it’s here inside the waiting that we learn to not rely quite so much on sight, as honestly, sometimes what we see seems too tragic to believe. Just look again at the story that those who knew Christ personally had personally experienced. All they had seen up until now here in between was just their friend dying.

Is that to be the end of it? Seeing is believing, right? And if that is the case as so many assume to have surmised, well then, I guess He’s just dead and our hope and faith and trust along with Him. Right? Seeing is believing? Or, and as I’ve fought frequently against of late and long before, is seeing only a hindrance to believing? For what’s the gravity of believing in only what we see? Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the opportunity for things such as growth and trust and courage when seeing asks none of the above?

Or rather are all the above only evidence of a life lived boldly in between the moments that this world assumes mean the most?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely not in any way saying that Good Friday and the scene spilled upon Calvary isn’t a huge part of this story. Nor am I contending that Easter Sunday isn’t the magnificent miracle we all believe it to be. No, I’m only getting at the crux of our involvement in this story. For Friday and Sunday are the days in which Christ did the heaviest of heavy lifting within both the dying and reviving. Both of which are cornerstones to this story of His glory. I’m just pointing out that this Saturday in the middle is where you and I take up our faith and follow.

For today is when we either believe or give in to doubt again. Today is the day where our trust grows in tomorrow being all He said it would bring, or rather the day in which such trust simply dies should agree with the world who still assumes Him dead. Today is the day in which patience becomes a friend we never knew it to be ever before, as now we see that patience allows us to learn the sort of humility needed for trust and hope and courage to take root.

Yes, today is the day when faith does what faith must, wait.

Faith teaches us to wait, to believe, to hold onto hope despite our eyes saying we don’t have much reason. And well, we need the ordinary aspects of life such as uncertainty to allow us the opportunity to show Him that we believe in spite of what we see. For that is the necessity of faith as simply put, often times we’ll not have the luxury of seeing, of knowing, of hearing or of any other brand of evidence we so often look for and lean on.

No, much of life and all of faith grows in the middle where we’re left to be the ones who choose faith over fear, over doubt, over confusion, over uncertainty. Because that is a choice that we all must make, and one we’ll find many times along this narrowing road. So let us not hasten nor hurry these days of ordinary insignificance. Because as the Easter story has taught us, maybe the middle isn’t quite as insignificant after all.

Maybe it’s the middle that makes it all finally personal, exactly what we need for our faith to grow into what He knows it can be, which can only ever be only what we’ve always yet to see.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold