What About Saturday

When we think about Easter weekend we remember Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but what about Saturday?

Last year when I was in Freedom Academy Level 2 we needed to come with a lower level trauma story. During that weekend we sat with the emotions of that story. We called it Saturday.

In the Easter story we tend to go straight from Good Friday to Easter Sunday and never even think about Saturday. How many times in our own stories do we want to do the same thing. We have some trauma, big or small, and then just want to go to the good part of the story.

The thing is, there’s space there for a reason. The healing journey takes time and it needs to be experienced. Jesus died on the cross and experienced the death that we deserved. He felt the taste of hell, and bore that gladly because He loves us. But, it was painful, and He felt every bit of it before His resurrection; before our healing.

The truth is, the pathway to healing doesn’t go around the pain, it goes through it. That weekend we sat in our story, in the hurt, in the Saturday. We learned to not be afraid of the pain, to embrace it, to embrace the truth of what happened. We learned to not dismiss our feelings about it. In many cases we realized that wrong was done to us, and that it was not okay. We grieved. We felt the feelings that were buried, or not allowed to come out at the time of the incident.

Most importantly, we invited the Lord into our grief. We were held by Him. Comforted by Him. Not only did He take that Saturday for us all those years ago, He sits with us in all our Saturdays. He heals us as He sits with us, much like He did in the tomb.

And that changes everything…