Lift up your heads

This Easter weekend was achingly beautiful.

Devastatingly joyful.

The days marched onward as we drew nearer and nearer to the cross…Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday. Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.

Easter has been my favorite holiday for as long as I can remember. Growing up, my mom, having been raised in the Catholic Church, loved the solemnity of Holy Week, and impressed the same awe and sadness of Christ’s walk to the cross on my young heart. On Easter morning, I would don a bright new dress, and still basking in the joy of a beautifully crafted Easter basket, we would go to church and worship the God who could not be defeated by death. It was so joyful, so beautiful, so meaningful. We were part of a greater, bigger story. After church, my whole family would come over and we would feast, laugh, and take joy in one another.

This year, with 3 kids gone, and so much to grieve, I didn’t have the heart for much celebration, because after Caleb died, Easter week is so much more sad.

Yet…surprisingly, it is so much more hopeful than ever before.

There were moments this week, when grief weighed so heavy on my chest that it threatened to crush me. I could feel the sorrow coursing through my veins, crushing my very heart, with its power.

At a moment when I thought I could bear it no longer, I would look up and see the wind gently lifting a butterfly on it’s gusts, or the leaves blowing softly in the breeze and I was comforted. There were times when I sat in the sanctuary feeling the weight of an earth cursed by the very sin that has stained the world since the garden, and I would look up to see the cross delicately draped with a white cloth and I would know in the fullness of my being that because of that very cross, death no longer had the last word. The hope we have because of Jesus, is not just a nicety that we claim, it’s real.

And it meets us in our brokenness.

I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. I can attest to it.

In the messiness of my life, God does not run away, but is right here holding me in my sorrow, beckoning me to lift up my head and remember. I hear the sweet call of his voice whispering to me to call to my mind his faithfulness of old and his tender loving care, so that I could say along with Samuel the prophet,

“Till now the Lord has helped us.”

1 Samuel 7:12

Beset by enemies threatening to destroy them, the Israelites needed to be reminded that God had been faithful. He had loved them, saved them, fought for them, and delivered them. So, Samuel set up the stone of remembrance, an Ebenezer, to remind God’s people of all that God had done for them.

But, God…

“I wish that this pain was not ours to bear.

I wish that the world we live in wasn’t so broken and filled with the pain of loss and betrayal.”

As I sat there in the house of God, I pondered the beauty and the brokenness.

Isaiah says of the Lord that he will…

“…provide for those who grieve in Zion –
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of
righteousness,
a planting of the Lord
for the display of his splendour.”

Isaiah 61:3

Right now, we live in the tension of the

Already…

but not yet.

Already, because we can know the joy of redemption through the

blood of Christ

…who has already come, already died in our place, and already rose again, so that we too, can rise with him.

But we also still live in this painfully heavy, grief stricken world where we still feel the pain that comes from the curse. We still feel the heaviness that threatens to crush us. From this, we are not yet fully redeemed.

When you feel this weight, sweet friend, lift up your head…

Let your eyes catch the sunset lighting up the sky with that dazzling after glow,

watch the breeze as it delicately plays with the leaf outside your window,

listen to the persistent chirp of the robin as it sings it’s melody at the coming of spring…

This.

This is our ebeneezer.

This is our hope.

That God has walked with us through the darkest moment of our lives. He has not left us. He will never leave us. He will fight for us. He will save us.

And He will continue to do so now and forever, until the time he calls us home to himself.

And one day, this momentary affliction will seem like the smallest memory when we stand before Jesus himself and lift up our heads as we cry out in praise to him, along with all the host of heaven.