Good Friday

Often, at this point in the cycle, I imagine what might be happening "down there". Maybe Hansel and Gretel (thanks Beth) met up. Maybe Hansel said, "Hey cutie" and Gretel giggled, and just like when J and I exchanged rings, the two maybe became one. It could have happened. Maybe it's happening.

But it made me think how often enormous change starts in the stillness, in the secret, without anyone knowing. A brand new person (it may as well be a brand new world) is knit together from two little cells. So quietly. So enormous. So small.

It made me think that so often, this is how God works in us. I think when we ask for good things, whether they be patience, kindness, goodness, justice, or "just" the ability to love, the answer is always "yes", but sometimes the work He starts in us is so far back and so deep in us that we can't see them right away. But they're there. I look back and think of the things I prayed for, say, 7 years ago. Today, I see them starting to come to fruition. I am a whole person. Happy. Secure. Scarred, but so very very alive. The process started so deep, I almost could have missed it. I could have despaired and given up. Maybe, at times I did. But, faithfully, He didn't. (Have you ever noticed that sometimes, the ability to ask for something - the ability to want something so hard to want - is part of the answer to the very asking? Grace breathes there too, and that, I think, is the divine chicken and egg joke.)

And here it is Good Friday, the day we remember the utter horror that faced the universe so many years ago when all hope was lost, when all faith was limp, and when God Himself was dead. Tomorrow is Holy Saturday, the gray day of stillness. The day that looked like a closet, but became a hallway. The day that looked like the end, but was really the Beginning. The day when all seemed lost, and yet those lost to death were seen walking the cities. We didn't know it at the time, but Saturday was the day death died, not God. In the stillness, in the darkness, He worked our rebirth, our release, our redemption.

But then, it makes sense. Because in the beginning, he sang all this out of nothing. It seems to be His joy to weave, out of desolation, life.