**Note** I wrote this a few months ago in the week leading up to Easter. It has been sitting in my draft box along with several other half-finished essays and posts. I share it today even though it is out of season, but the truth still stands.
One morning this past week, while the light was still gray and a cold rain soaked into the earth and possibly my bones (our heat wasn’t working great), I was huddled on the couch with coffee, shivering, talking with Josh and his parents who were in town for the weekend. Suddenly, Josh straightened up, looking out the window with concern, and then left the room.
Our school buses— two small, white unassuming things with faded lettering— sit less than a hundred feet from our living room and Josh had seen someone open the back door and crawl in. We all watched from the window, a little nervous. The surrounding area is known for its homeless population and prevalent substance abuse.
Josh carefully opened the door, talked to whoever was inside for a moment, and then a young man came out, huddled in a thin hoodie wet from the rain. He said he was on the way to his brother’s house down the road, though who really knows. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and said he had just needed a place for his feet to thaw out so he could keep going.
Josh gave him a pair of shoes and a handful of food. I wanted to feed him for real, but Josh said, “I think they prefer this”— as in, granola bars and easy snacks. Really? I thought. Over a biscuit and eggs? Maybe. It was hard to tell in the moment. It was hard to know what to do, to be honest. Evaluating if this person was armed, or high, or dangerous in some way, but then perceiving their need, their possible helplessness, and feeling compelled to help. To do something.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that young man. The rain was so cold all day, and even though I struggled to stay warm, I was inside and with plenty of clothes and blankets and food. Should we have tried to do more? And where is the line between responsibility and safety as parents and school administrators but also eschewing all that to be our brother’s keeper?
And then it was Holy Week and here I am still thinking about that kid and others like him.
Holy Week always leaves me in knots. It’s my favorite week of the year. It’s also my least favorite week of the year. It’s the most beautiful story. It’s the story that shapes and defines my life, my whole existence. And it’s the hardest story to wrestle with. On some level, I always feel undone. My poor husband knows, there are going to be tears for one reason or probably many.
For a long time now, probably close to fifteen years, I’ve been an enthusiast for following the church calendar. I didn’t grow up in a liturgical church and so mine is perhaps a common story of being drawn to the more formal and structured because it seems to resonate more with a sacredness and spiritual weight than the informal, unstructured practices of my youth. Liturgy doesn’t hold any baggage for me. I don’t have an experience of the deadness or rote-ness of it that some do.
But all these past years living in China, liturgical churches were not an option. And so for many years, as my knowledge about the church calendar grew, I labored on my own to live within the Christian Year, following the church calendar by observing things that were foreign to my formational years— Advent and Lent as seasons of preparation for Christmas and Easter, learning about practices and ways of reading Scripture to inhabit a regular cycle of the life of Christ and the church, observing Epiphany and Pentecost, the Transfiguration and Ordinary Time. I loved it all and I still do.
The church calendar seemed to me as I read about it through the beauty of other people’s experiences, so full of meaning and such a helpful way to order our lives under the umbrella of God’s time as over and against all the secular forces pressing against our daily lives.
But it is hard to live this way on your own. Even practicing it as a family, and sometimes inviting others to share in it (the years we held Advent services in our home are still dear to me) was just so much work. I wanted to be in fellowship with others who were doing the same. I wanted someone else explaining Lent rather than me. I wanted to show up on Sunday where the candles were being lit, or extinguished, not always trying to figure out how to make it happen in the seclusion of our home.
Fast forward to this year, to this Holy Week. It feels like it should be the most important week of the year, and yet I am scrambling to find all the ways to make it meaningful, to show our kids what really matters, to help them live in this story that changes our lives. We go to a wonderful church, but it is far from liturgical. And with that I am also realizing again and again in more ways than I want to admit that I am dealing with the loss of our old life, and getting used to the goodness that I will find in this new one. It is easy when you leave a place to shake the dust off your feet of all the things that drive you crazy, the things you are sure you will never miss. Then suddenly you find you have not replaced the things you have lost, and you are not sure if you ever will.
I have spent the last several days in Matthew’s gospel, trying to sit in the dust of those final days— at the feet of Jesus and his teachings just before his death. There are stinging parables, alarming judgments, and vague statements of future events. And there is an utter commitment to do what can only be understood as the greatest and severest act of love. I was struck by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking his closest friends to remain with him because he was struggling. He was at his lowest point, wrestling with the unfathomable task ahead of him. He asks them for just their presence, and they fail him. They fall asleep. Repeatedly. And his words, poured out in desperation even as he is abandoned and alone, tell of a willingness that goes beyond anything I can understand. “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
I think grief and loss are real things. It’s okay to realize that moving is hard and that change has brought a layer of sadness to my life. But my sadness over a less-than-meaningful Easter falls flat in light of the Easter story itself.
The truth is that I am, we all are, like those tired disciples, not really getting the momentous weight of the occasion. Our whole lives in this broken world are one blunder after another, with a Risen Lord who went ahead and did the impossibly hard thing anyway, for us. He deserves (and enjoys! delights in!) our worship. Whether it is beautifully done in the most meaningful way or not.
Holy week has come and gone. The young man hasn’t returned, and there have been no more visitors to our buses (which are now locked). I still wonder about him, and what we should have done. I still think about the means of our worship, and whether it matters as much as I think it does, or if the story of the disciples in Gethsemane falling asleep should be more instructive to me than it is.
What is interesting about the resurrection is that it astounds people. It changes them. Whether or not I have the perfect plan for how to respond to the hurting or the poor, whether or not I have a highly purposeful way to engage in worship, it is the One I encounter that remains the most important. Am I astounded? Changed? Always struck in the face by the astounding grace I find there?
May we never stop being knocked off our feet, awakened from our slumber, and drawn to the Savior who disguises himself as lowly and accepts our worship from every humble place.