it's Holy Week and I'm tired

A friend asks how I’m celebrating Holy Week this year, and I admit to her that I don’t know how other than to crawl into it, dragging myself one hand over the other. 

March has been weird this year, as March often is. I’m exhausted. Things have felt heavy.

I want to be the girl who runs towards Easter with intention, dancing her way through the Gospels and filling her home with touches of spring. I want to be drenched in study guides and rolling out fresh dough. Instead, I find myself reaching for my laptop at 2am to wrangle out just one more thing and remembering at 10pm that I never did open my church’s Easter devotional text for the day.

When I tell you I’m crawling, I’m really crawling, friends.

Hannah Brencher talks a lot about the Saturday of Easter week—the day of darkness and grief that came before the resurrection—and that’s where I’m finding myself this year. In the Saturday—in the mess and confusion and weary waiting for the tomb to open.

I remind myself that we have an advantage. We know Sunday is coming.

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I’m a girl who clings to words like lifeboats, and “deliverance” has been the one taking up its tent in my mind this week.

The singular beauty I’ve found in being reminded so vividly of how broken our days are is the knowledge that it’s not supposed to be like this—the promise that it won’t always be like this.

I try to steady myself with it. This is the point of this week, I tell myself. There’s a reason He had to die.

There’s a strange stillness here, even when my brain feels like it’s going a million miles an hour. There’s a closeness, when I let there be.

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Maybe it’s feeling like Saturday in your world, too.

In the waiting.

In the grief.

In the questions.

There’s a specific loneliness that comes in the heavy seasons. In the times where it all feels like too much and there’s no clear path forward, and in the moments where it seems unfathomable that anyone else can really get your hurt.

Holy Week reminds us that we aren’t putting our faith in a God who hasn’t walked our side of the story, who doesn’t know the brokenness firsthand.

It’s in the darkness that I lean on the humanity of Jesus. That I remind myself again and again: He’s been here, too.

He’s seen the hurt. He felt it, tasted it, bitter and sharp.

And then He paved a way to yank forever from its grasp.

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It’s Holy Week, and I’m tired. 

The days are short and long all at once, and I find my prayers are less structured than I’d like and more conversational, which, if I’m honest probably fits my relationship with God more closely, anyway. I whisper prayers in between emails and as I wash my hands, let the words of friends roll over me like oceans of grace.

We’re in the Saturday, friends, and if I’m honest, it’s not my favorite place to be. But all around me, I’m seeing the world wake up again. Most of the branches out my window are still bare and brittle, but the cherry tree is in full bloom. I go outside to sit in the sun and spot tiny purple wildflowers springing up at my feet, tucked away nearly out of sight in the corner of the yard. I find mercy in weird, unexpected places, and I force stubborn hope to push me onward.

Deliverance: “the act of being rescued or set free.”

The stone rolled away. The tomb empty. Breakfast on a beach with a man they watched bleed.

A promise: that one day it will all be new again.

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It’s Holy Week, and I’m tired, but I think He was, too.

And so I remind myself—I remind you—that we haven't reached the end yet.

Because I know the Saturday doesn’t last.

Because I know there's more than I can see.

Because I know this is not all there is. I know this is not all that will be.

And I know the world is heavy, but I know my Redeemer lives.

And no matter the Holy Week, that's enough for me.

Happy Holy Week, friends. Sunday's coming. Keep holding on.