Day 4059 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 27:14 NIV

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Oftentimes in within this life life itself feels as if this swirling sea of uncertainty that comes rolling daily upon the shores of what we thought we were sure about only to bring with the torrents this tearing apart of all we thought we knew. So many days find us feeling as if our beliefs are only at best broken and battered as they’re sometimes left to the breakers and betrayals of the betters for which we’d again dared believe. For indeed, belief is a truly powerful thing as it inspires us to press forward through whatever may lie along the way to our much-anticipated brighter day.

But the storms, oh the storms.

And that they’re mixed with an oddly screaming silence in which we’re finally left to hear the honesty of our thoughts, the tragedy of our attempts, the reality of our inability to really make anything happen at all. It’s like it all just arrives us to this place in which everything is ripped apart and we’re left so unsure of where to start that sadly we just never might.

After all what’s the point, right?

What’s the purpose in our purchase of what’s likely to be only one more excitement given only to one more thing that inevitability usually laughs as we plan? What the use in our using our time to allow our mind to imagine what the future will prove it couldn’t so fathom? Why give ourselves as fully as we have so often as we did to all these ideals which never become anything more than lofty ideas held inside a mind held inside a mine that is our own hope?

Indeed, why even hope anymore when all the years in which we have haven’t added up to all that much if anything at all other than a loss of everything we had, everything we were, everything we believed so strongly that both we and life and love and faith and forever might actually be able to be?

Because so often we find that all the above and all of their like, they just never turn out anything like anything we imagined they might.

Sort of like that time when those 11 stood speechless in a crowd made up of even some folks they knew who had decide they too were through with enduring this sounding teaching which poured from the words of He who came doing something so audacious, so auspicious, so suspicious as healing the sick and giving sight to the blind and movement to the lame and hope to the lost and life to all of us at what was such a cost that it almost seems as if still today we just don’t want to think about it all that much.

Because can you imagine the gravity held inside facing down the reality of everything you’d hoped for, everything you’d worked for, everything you’d prayed for and longed for and loved for was simply led to a hill and butchered for a cheering crowd?

And yet, doesn’t that honestly sound like the very sum of so many things that we ourselves have endured?

Indeed, how many times thus far in this life have we found this knife stuck in the back of something for which we’d believed so strongly would work so wonderfully only to find only that it came to what amounted to nothing? How many times have we watched our dreams go up in smoke? How many times have our hopeful words turned out unable to fulfill our hope? How often have we sat speechless as we watched our deepest ideal just dissolve?

And yet, even those moments of sheer disappointment aren’t the only times in which we struggle with faith and hope and love and trust and thus all of life itself, are they?

No. For what about all those times in which we get what we thought we wanted only for it to turn out nothing like we’d expected or imagined? What about those times in which our ideas all but turned into our demise? What about all those times in life in which we’re just asked to wait, to trust even though it’s hard, to continue believing even though the sum of what we’re seeing is showing us a scene in which we cannot possibly see anything worth our continued hoping?

Yeah, we’ve all witnessed a lot of our investments go up in smoke, plenty enough to know that there’s always that now-proven tendency for them to do such a thing.

But perhaps even more than those horrors have come those hours spent unsure, uncertain, suddenly confused as to what to say, what to do, what any of it would matter even if we were to.

Because the simple truth is that there are many moments in life in which our words won’t matter and our hopes won’t change anything and our every action and most urgent trust just won’t amount to much. In fact, sometimes our very best will only arrive at asking us to wait and see. To hold tight to all that we’d claimed we believed. To literally put our faith where our feet are as we ask them not to move from what sure seems a scene in which it seems we’ll lose everything.

For that’s what faith asks us to do.

To move when we need to and not to when we don’t. And the struggle with belief is the discernment in which we grow to see the vast discrepancy defined between. For the truth of life is that as those alive in what is a time in which everything is always moving so fast around us, our slowing down, stopping even, it’s the surest version of losing that we can imagine. For it causes us to come out from the craze spent inside this maze that is this place in which we wage what is this war for this perpetual evermore that everyone here seems so very sure is just up ahead.

All while we just feel this need to sometimes stop running and just hold the cold bleeding remnants of what was once, and recently at that, a hope that we’d had that we’d held so surely that it seemed nothing could undo it.

But sometimes life here amongst those who live here proves able to do what our hope-filled expectations would never expect.

Sort of like that time when those 11 stood speechless in a crowd made up of even some folks they knew who had decide they too were through with enduring this sounding teaching which poured from the words of He who came doing something so audacious, so auspicious, so suspicious as healing the sick and giving sight to the blind and movement to the lame and hope to the lost and life to all of us at what was such a cost that it almost seems as if still today we just don’t want to think about it all that much.

Because the reality of this faith as placed in Christ is that it changes everything about our lives. Such is the unrealized gravity that is the opportunity that we’re all given inside His calling us share in Him. It’s that in doing so we do, but not just the easy parts. Not just the safe parts. Not only those aspects and intrigues that are so clearly amazing that we truly grow to this point in which we simply cannot wait to be where He’s gone.

No, it’s the going through what He went through to get there. Maybe not to the tune of our being crucified too, though some of those who followed Him then were. Even upside down!

And yet, is that not sometimes what this faith feels like in this life?

That it turns everything upside down? That everything we knew is suddenly flipped on its head as ours is filled with uncertainty where there was just certainty yesterday? Indeed, how many times in life thus far have we been so filled with one expectation that was only turned into something of a complete opposition in as little as a breath?

It’s a phone call with hard news. It’s a boss calling into the office at work. It’s a drive home after that same boss fired you for something you didn’t do. It’s the family waiting there to welcome you home unaware of the news that will upend everything. It’s the loss of a loved one. It’s the cost of an all too familiar mistake that you promised yourself you’d never again make. It’s a question asked that you’re not ready for. It’s a reminder of something you did before.

It’s a broken Saturday spent still reeling from a Friday spent seeing the greatest hope you’ve ever known be killed by the very same crowd that He’d healed and helped and loved.

A Saturday now spent entirely unsure about everything as, well, up until that time that Man they just killed had became all that mattered, and so all of life itself now lay shattered upon the shore of an uncertainty that suddenly becomes the only certainty you know.

Because often in life all we can know is only what little we see. And, well, truth is that there are going to be a lot of times in every one of our lives in which what we see doesn’t make any sense. It’s all going to feel backwards and betrayed. It’s going to take some time and then get delayed. It’ll ask us to wait in hope and there to learn more of hope as we wait some more. In fact, sometimes life will take from us everything we counted on and relied upon and leave us standing there motionless thanks to our having no idea what to do as we just can’t wrap our minds around what just happened.

Sort of like that time when those 11 stood speechless still after the cheering crowd had gone home as if nothing had happened at all.

All while they were left there shattered having watched their Savior be beaten and battered, broken and bloodied by what then proved a world that was nothing like any of us still tend to hope it is.

No friends, this world is nothing like we’d like it to be. This place isn’t our rest, not some resort, not at all anything of a reward. Rather this world is our war. It’s a walk won within worry more times than not. It’s a time spent spinning violently out of control. It’s the sum of taking everything we ever come to know and throwing it out the door as we lay in pieces on our bedroom floor fighting to just find a word that seems to say anything that makes any sense at all out of everything that suddenly makes no sense at all.

For life here, and the faith we struggle to follow and honor and uphold while we’re here, it’s again more times than not something of this sea of constant uncertainty that comes sweeping us off our feet and away from our hopes every single day all while we just continue to grasp for anything of sense or sensibility that might offer us a bit of hope inside the growing severity.

Because this world is set on severing everything we know from all we thought we knew. This place is the veritable meat grinder in which we’re given constantly to watching all that makes sense go up in smoke while we sit on the sidelines without so much as an idea as to how it keep it all together anymore.

Maybe we’re not supposed to.

Maybe that’s what this Saturday in between is supposed to help us see. That life isn’t about what we know, what we think, what all we can or can’t do about it. Maybe sometimes the only thing we’re meant to do is sit silently inside the shock and sorrow, allowing them freely to unravel all that we know into what then becomes a way of life in which we can’t walk because we’ve just learned we don’t know how to. Yes, what if this life in this place is meant to cut our feet out from under us? What if the battle’s meant to take our breath away?

What if the journey home is supposed to rip away all that we can do, all we know how to say, every single thing that we ever dared to think we knew, all so that He can replace it with something new?

And indeed, this much can be a hope too as, well, looking around it’s becoming easier and easier for us to see the vast and still growing need for His kind of different being done in us.

But so often it feels as if His different is done in asking us to wait. To hope. To trust Him even when it only seems that all we see is the evidence of everything we understood being drown inside a torrent of a world that knows only to try and break everything good.

That’s the oddity of Good Friday.

It’s that it’s good not because of what He had to endure nor the reasons why as what He went through was more brutal than we could ever imagine and that because it was to accomplish the draining dry of the now refilling cup of the full wrath of God that we've all continued to incur in lives that we’ve all still chosen to live far more sinful than we've ever cared to confess.

No, it was good because He did it.

Christ endured the fullness of God’s fury aimed at us so that we’d not have to because He knew that we’d not survive it.

So He died in it at the hands of those who proved why it was needed.

And yet such a scene is still hard for us to understand I think. Because it does indeed change everything. This Easter weekend is one of those that used to come and go with little more than a lot of excitement over an Easter basket left by a giant bunny filled with plenty of color and even more candy. And yet as I’ve grown I’ve learned more and more every year the real reason for the celebration. And, well, it’s truly impossible to put into words.

And yeah, I say that as someone who writes these thousands of them every single day trying!

But it’s impossible to convey as it’s impossible to cover. There is simply no way for us to say all that this weekend means as it starts with the week prior in which our Savior is cheered on as victor riding lowly upon a donkey toward what only He knew would be a week of horror spent in chains and sorrow as He endured the fullness of the wrath of both God and man, aimed always against one another but for this time both right at Him.

A wrath blended together upon Good Friday in which He was crucified.

A horror stolen away as they raced to the grave early on the third day to see that it was empty.

A sight they couldn’t wait to see because they’d been through the Saturday in between.

I don’t know that it’ll ever fail to fascinate me, this Saturday in between. For both Friday and Sunday are both so well known that they’ve each famous titles, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But this Saturday in the middle is honestly one of the most important parts to this puzzle that this our place in His promise of our peace that’s held inside our piece of that place that that empty grave says He has really gone to make ready for our to come.

Important because it’s our life.

The only part we can ever know here is that walked both after He was crucified and yet still before He returns. It’s therefore still highly uncertain, isn’t it? In fact this is quite why most here find this faith to be foolish. It’s because He’s not here, not that we can see. Rather the world as a whole continues downward into this hole in which all it seems we do know is only still hate, darkness, division, depravity driving it all.

And so those of us who believe in Him, we’re still here inside what is a kind of life spent inside a place that’s still filled with those who still mock, who still deny, who are still more than happy to continue to try to rid this world of His Name all so that they can feel still free to spend this life as if a game in which the only thing that matters is their having fun and feeling good.

Yes, we are living the Saturday in between in which we can’t see Christ but yet walk alongside a vast majority who clearly contend that He never lived as they do still the sorts of things that cost His suffering and purchased His misery.

And no, it doesn’t make any sense. And yes, sometimes it’s scary. And yeah, it’s sometimes hard to keep holding out hope as this world we’re in continues to sever the rope that is our one Way home.

Will we let them?

That’s the question that’s asked on this Saturday in the middle.

Will we let what we see, what we hear, how we’ll probably feel about it cause us to give up on it?

Because the fact is that in this life what we’ll often find is that even imagining Christ is just about the hardest thing to do as we’re still a people who rely entirely too heavily on sight and, well, all we seem to see is still a world that’s living as if He isn’t.

And the sheer amount of darkness and depravity in this place does indeed make it all but impossible somedays to imagine something better.

But we have to agree to give up when all hope seems lost.

Will we?

Friends, the point is that this was never meant to be easy, to make sense, to go well. Rather this life is our time in which we’re to find a faith that doesn’t rely upon this place nor the way in which it lives. Because we’re rarely going to see the empty grave. More often than not we’re just going to watch a world that still exists in a blatant denial of He who isn’t there anymore.

There is nothing easy about waiting, much less when it’s done in uncertainty and sorrow.

But such is the necessity of strength, of courage, of our audacity to keep on hoping even when all hope seems lost.

It’s because there will come times in life in which it will.

But friends, hope is only ever truly lost if we agree to give it away.

And yeah, such is easy on a day like this Saturday in between when all we’ve seen is that Jesus is dead and we’re as of yet unsure as to whether or not He’s still in that grave as for today that stone remains in place.

That’s why faith is the substance of things hoped for and an assurance of things unseen.

Because we can believe that even though Friday was horrific and Saturday is often spent doing nothing as we’re unsure of what to do, Sunday’s coming.

And so too the Son.

So indeed, let us take heart and stand in courage. Not because it will ever make sense to do so, but simply because if we don’t then what faith do we have?

Because faith is for when things go bad.

And well, as of Saturday all they knew for sure was that Jesus was gone.

Do we have yet the faith that He’s coming back? And, well, if we don’t there is still hope as the truth is that the waiting is for us to find it.

After all, what else is there better to do until He returns than learn to hold onto the hope that He will?

Won’t always make it easy but, again, easy was never the promise.

But that He shall return for us.

Until then we wait.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold