I’m a Good Friday girl. Holy Thursday and Good Friday have always been my favorite days of the liturgical year.
They always made sense to me. The readings, the ceremony, the dramatic music, the dramatic lack of bells and statues… it all added up to remind me of something I knew.
Life involves suffering.
It is what it is. Life is hard. We have to deal with it. No one is going to come rescue us from our darkness.
Sounds harsh. It is. That’s what I believed.
Then this Lent came, and my whole world was turned upside down. I got rid of a lot of heavy baggage this Lent.
Physically, we downsized a lot in terms of our possessions. Goodwill will make a mint off of us.
In terms of time, I got off of facebook which means I spent a whole lot less time on my phone. And the technology aside, my mind was more clear. It wasn’t constantly filled with the news drama of the day. I wasn’t trying to follow arguments and craft counterarguments.
And I fed my brain with real food. My reading mainly consisted of reading for my Bible Study and reading for my book group. (We have read Seven Storey Mountain and The Great Divorce this Lent.) This meant that my mind was filled with lightness and beauty and truth from words written by people honestly searching for the good and the true.
And yet still, my general mindset stayed the same. God was there. I wanted to know Him. I desperately tried to understand Him enough to put Him in a little box and say “check, I now understand God.”
That was my focus.
And then our world changed.
Eleven days ago our whole family went to a healing service at our church by Fr Ubald. He’s a Rwandan priest with a healing charism.
We went to pray for healing for my TJ. And to make a very long story very short, within 5 days of going to that Mass, the daily, nonstop pain he has been experiencing for the past 2.5 years is gone. It hasn’t come back.
I didn’t know what to make of this. Of course I believed the miracle. There really was no other explanation, try as I may to find it. There was no denying the alleviation of pain. Everything about him was different.
And all of a sudden, I, this Good Friday chick, woke up to a world that didn’t make sense to me anymore. God, this God I have been praying to my whole life, this God I have been studying for quite some time, this God I have been contemplating and considering showed me something I never knew about him despite all of that.
He showed me that he loved me. And He loved my family. And He wanted us to be happy.
I spent days after TJ’s healing utterly exhausted. I felt like I was walking in a world where the shades had finally been raised. Everything looked normal, but nothing felt normal. And it wasn’t just the dramatic change that the healing brought to our family life. It wasn’t just the uncontrollable joy we all felt. It was God. He broke out of the little box I had tried so hard to put Him in and He did the one thing I never thought He would do – He made it personal.
Tonight after I finished our dinner dishes, I sat down at our kitchen table with a cup of coffee bracing myself for the storm that is Holy Saturday evening with four young children. I was listening to my favorite album on Alexa, and the following lyrics came through:
“Were you there when God raised Him from the dead?
Were you there when God raised Him from the dead?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when God raised Him from the dead.”
And like a loon, tears started to fill my eyes. They rolled down my cheeks. And I couldn’t hold it back. This Good Friday girl was experiencing Easter.
I was realizing for the first time that this God who I’ve always tried to know and who I always loved, loved me back to. He was personal to me. He was mine. I could rejoice in this triumph of this God who knows me and loves me intimately. Who wants to show me love. Who wants to be known by me.
The world still doesn’t look the same. Even if TJ’s pain came back tomorrow, I don’t think I could ever go back to before he was healed. Too much has changed. Too much no longer makes sense in the most beautiful of ways.
In this life, it’s all too easy to get caught up in Good Friday. It’s easy to see our suffering and close our eyes to the graces that abound. But God loves us all and wants us all to feel that love. Sometimes He shows it in dramatic ways like we experienced two weeks ago, but more often, it’s in small ways that we have to really look to find.
But He is there.
Good Friday never was supposed to be the end of the story.
“We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.” (St Augustine.)
Happy Easter my friends. God is good!