Good Friday

Good Friday is about poverty.

It's about losing the most important thing in the world.  It's about everything, everything, being dark.  Very dark.  About hopelessness and heartbreak; curtains ripping from top to bottom, God turning away, blinking.

About crying.  It's a lot about crying.

I struggle with balancing this darkness with the knowledge that daybreak is coming again.  I also struggle with Holy Saturday, but for entirely different reasons.  But on Good Friday my problem is simple:  how to feel deep, lasting, spiritual mournfulness when I know how the story ends.  In two days He rises from the dead!  Let's just skip all of this sad stuff and get to the happy ending!  Right?

Hmmmm.


{Okay, after reading another post on Good Friday I feel like, just in case anyone decides to mis-interpret the above sentences, I need to just add a small bit of clarification.  I am a Christian.  I understand in both a historical and a spiritual sense what the death of the Christ meant to me as an individual and to the world as a whole.  I know of the horror He would have endured and, as much as a woman who has never been beaten who is sitting in front of a computer in 21st century Canada is able to, I understand the story.  This is not me saying 'Meh.  It wasn't that big a deal.  He comes back to life."  This is me saying "It IS a big deal.  It is the biggest of big deals.  And I don't know HOW to make it a huge big deal in the context of the entire Easter story."  Because when you know how the story ends, sometimes you have trouble with the emotions that are supposed to be there when you don't know how the story ends.  Anyway, end of rant.}