my maybe resurrection.

I don’t often think about the weight of Holy Saturday, that stretch of tension between the darkness of Good Friday and the rising light of Resurrection Sunday. I like my Easters served well done, no blood in the middle, a side of loud worship and french toast breakfasts and bright spring colors, please and thank you.

I’ve no time for the gloomy stuff, the things of the in-between, the shades of gray that seem to taint my rose-colored lenses every other day of the year.

As children, Easter was always a time of peanut butter cups and festive egg hunts, of honey baked ham and hot apple pie. Holidays equaled extended family dysfunction shoved under the table, screams and fights and bubbling bitterness bottled up if just for a day, glossing over the hard truths of this life with a half-hearted He Is Risen and a slightly shorter sermon than regular Sundays.

I used to believe that holidays had to be perfect to be good, that Easter meant no more fighting and no more sinning and no more heaviness. Just light. Just a fresh spring breeze, blowing through the house of cards we built neatly on top of our walls, our ruins, our fires.

This past Saturday came heavy for me, the death of my grandpa only days before, on the precipice of Good Friday, where death seems to be all the rage, all the pastors talk about. The death and the darkness and the brutality of the Crucifixion, thousands of years ago, always with the hope of Sunday’s coming resurrection.

But this death was more than a recited passage, more than another sermon on the night is darkest before the dawn, but a tangible mess of things broken and bleeding, dangling loose ends and chipped paint on the walls. Death is a permanent fixture on earth here, at least. Inevitable, and brutal, no matter how expected. And Friday walked into Saturday, promising the maybe hope of Sunday, and I repeated that over and over to myself, through the haze of what I was feeling, encrypted moments of impossible heaviness, weighed down by my sudden inability to sort through thoughts and feelings.

This, I suppose, is a wobbly attempt at doing just that.

Maybe. Just maybe. Maybe there is more.

And I circled back to my maybes, that although Grandpa’s death was an always thing, somewhere in the recesses of my heart I felt that Jesus’ wasn’t. Somewhere down there, cradled in the immense depths of the deep, I knew that Jesus was there, that he was still showing up today. This death is a temporary thing, beloved one, your lives complete in the blink of an eye. But I have brought eternity down into this world, look, I have brought eternity right into your beating heart.

And even though I couldn’t see it, I knew it was in Grandpa’s heart, too.

And so Saturday was a back-and-forth kind of day, a day of running in circles right when I thought I had jumped out of them. A day of wanting ever so fiercely to be surrounded by people, laughing and sharing and being ever so present, while wanting to curl up by myself with a blanket and some Netflix at the same time. A day of clinging to the hope of tomorrow’s resurrection, this notion that we all will rise again, that Love really does win in the end, while feeling so weighed down with questions and fear, anger and guilt, sadness and doubt, that maybe this whole Easter ‘thing’ was just a watered down attempt to make us feel good about where we are now, where we’re going later. A day of searching for glimpses of light and retreating back into the dark.

Holy Saturday was the blood in the middle of a not-so-well-done Easter, an Easter stripped of the candy and the festive bright colors, an Easter with bare bones and silent spaces.

I found myself in those silent spaces often, gazing out the window with cloudy skies that seemed to mirror my heart and mind rather poignantly. It was there that I kept re-discovering and repeating the maybes.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow will bring a little resurrection. Maybe this whole Easter thing really is a glorious radiant reality we’re called to live into every day. Maybe. Just maybe.

And Sunday came with dim lights and flickering flames, booming worship that rattled my ears but not my heart, and a probably powerful sermon where I struggled to stay awake. And we declared he is risen, and I said all the words, and even when they felt like cardboard on my lips, I realized that this might be what the hope of maybe is all about.

That I was showing up, that I will keep showing up, because maybe that’s how we rise again.

And we sang a song with easy lyrics, we believe in God the Father, we believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in the Holy Spirit. And those simple words rang the most true to me, in the end, that I didn’t hang onto these beliefs from an island, wrestling with the light and the dark by myself, but that we all believe, as the Body of Christ, through disagreements and flaws and scars and fights that get too loud, we still believe and struggle in all of this together, as family.

And maybe it’s day after day of continuing to show up, of asking hard questions and being not afraid to lean into that uneasy tension of not-always answers and crowded silent spaces. Maybe it’s fighting and fumbling through the dark, grasping for true redemption before facing the truth that we’ve already been redeemed.

The Cross has already redeemed us, covered us, showered that eternity down into our hearts.

Maybe it’s that still small voice saying, Be still and rest. Redemption is right here, right now, right away. Maybe it’s about leaning into that reality, that Jesus always was, is, and is to come, and that somehow, someway, through constellations and galaxies and light years, I still believe. Grandpa still believed. We still believe.

This is my maybe resurrection, our maybe resurrection, a life lived in the Light that still feels like a slow crawl out of the dark grave sometimes. Maybe that truly is enough.

I'll miss you, Grandpa. I Love you Forever.