Sitting in Saturday
It was a picturesque Thursday before Easter weekend, a weekend where we celebrate the God-miracles of eternal life and the resurrection, that I watched my lifelong friend and his wife do the unbearable. They buried their stillborn first child. Diagnosed at 18 weeks with a rare condition known as Trisomy-13, this beautiful couple leaned into hope for healing the entire time all while being reminded by the doctors of the bleak reality stacked against them. His name was Judah Elias. Judah meaning “praise” and Elias meaning “the Lord is God” literally translates to “Praise the Lord for He is God.” Every time this precious boy’s name was spoken, praise. Not an easy word to muster watching my friends standing graveside gripping tightly to one another.
Yet through tear-soaked eyes, praise was the word my friend of thirty plus years spoke over everyone gathered to mourn the loss of Judah Elias. Listening to this father’s eulogy, I found myself struck with the contrast between these days. There was THIS day where God didn’t seem to move, and prayers weren’t answered on the threshold of THAT day where we celebrate God’s greatest miracle of all, the resurrection. How do you hold both the goodness of God and his redeeming work with a loss and a pain that, according to my friends words, feels so “unnatural and unbearable”?
I once heard someone describe this murky and confusing time as, “sitting in your Saturday.” If you think about the events of Easter weekend, it begins with Good Friday. Ironically enough, Good Friday is marked by death and despair. As the lyrics of Seth Condrey’s song, “Death Was Arrested” say, “Our savior displayed on a criminal's cross. Darkness rejoiced as though heaven had lost.” But God had a plan. And this same song describes the miracle that took place on Resurrection Sunday by belting out the rejoice, “But then Jesus arose with my freedom in hand. That’s when death was arrested and my life began.”
A day of life preceded by a day of death. Deep sorrow followed by great joy. However, in between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday was Saturday. Saturday, a day where Jesus was fighting a spiritual battle beyond anything the disciples could comprehend, which left them filled with grief, loss, doubts, confusion, and even fear. They had walked with Jesus and heard all that he had promised them. Yet hiding in fear of the same fate as Jesus, it seemed like none of it was true. Like the disciples, we all have our seasons of sitting in Saturday. Those seasons where the goodness and faithfulness of God don’t seem to line up with the circumstances of life around us. It’s a hard day.
When faced with the dreaded Saturday, I find people tend to process it in one of three ways. The first seems resigned to skip over the pain and unknowns of Saturday and skip straight to the resurrection. They gloss over the grief of the death because sitting with the pain is too much to bear. In desperation to reconcile a God who is supposed to be good with a God who allows the suffering to pass through His hands, they slap trite platitudes rooted in Bible verses on their wound. The problem with this is that it doesn’t bring about real healing. Of course there is comfort in scripture, but it matters how you apply it. You can put a band aid over a bullet hole in an effort to stop the bleeding, or you can apply the Word of God like a balm of Gilead that penetrates deep into the wound and brings true healing.
Then there are those who can’t skip over Saturday but rather get stuck there, swallowed whole by their tragedy. They can’t see the light of Sunday’s resurrection. They hate hope and lose faith that God could bring life and, dare I say, beauty out of such darkness. Hope loses its lead, and they begin to believe the lies that God must be against them or God must not be powerful enough in the hard times. Yet my friend would say, “As hard as it is to combat the enemy’s slings and arrows, we let hope lead us through. Believing the lies ultimately sells God short and sells us short of experiencing the fullness of God.”
Which leads me to those like my beautiful friends. While I haven’t been one walking closely beside them through this tragedy, at Judah’s funeral I witnessed a couple who can sit in their Saturday and grieve well. However, they don’t sit passively but actively. Just like Jesus did on the Saturday between the cross and the resurrection, they actively fight a spiritual battle. They fight the lies of the enemy and avoid the temptation to circumvent or succumb to the pain. Rather they allow God to move as Healer by leaning into their pain and seeking to understand it. They mourn, question, and at times even doubt all while clinging to their hope that Christ can redeem even this darkness. With wobbly knees, they stand on the belief that beauty could rise out of even these ashes. And while that journey from their Saturday to the light of Sunday is a long road marked with wrestling and lament, they are willing to walk the path for the glory of the God who is in the business of conquering darkness. They know it. For they have already seen it through the cross.
God has promised us that he USES everything for the good of those who love him, however not everything IS good. Illness is not good. Abuse is not good. Infertility is not good. Broken families are not good. What’s even harder is that there is no time table on our sitting in Saturday. We don’t know what mountains we will have to climb, how many ugly tears will be shed, or what forgiveness will need to happen in order for us to see the dawn of Sunday. For Sunday ushers in the moment where we finally catch a glimpse of light and the new life that was birthed out of the depths of pain and darkness. In our limited view, our glimpse might not even be this side of heaven. Yet the cross is the promise that life can come out of death, that a deeper joy can be birthed out of deep sadness. We just need to trust Jesus, our Healer and Waymaker, and be willing to sit in our Saturday.