Holy Saturday

This is the day no one knows what to do with.

Not the grief of Friday, which at least has clarity — the nails, the darkness, the loud cry, the end.

Not the joy of Sunday, which answers everything with an empty tomb and a folded cloth.

Saturday is the day of not-yet. The day the women sat with their spices and their shattered expectations and the long silence of a sealed stone.

They did not know Sunday was coming. They experienced Saturday as pure, unrelieved Saturday.

I know that feeling. The prayer not yet answered. The healing not yet arrived. The reconciliation still out of reach. The season that has not turned.

We live most of our faith-lives on Holy Saturday — between the promise and the fulfilment, between the death of what was and the arrival of what will be.

Sit here with me for a moment. God is at work in the Saturday. Sunday is coming. But it is not yet Sunday.

And Saturday is allowed to be Saturday.