The Day Nobody Talks About

I've been thinking about Saturday.

Not this Saturday specifically. The original one. The one between the crucifixion and the resurrection. The one nobody talks about because nothing happened — at least not anything anyone could see.

Jesus was dead. The disciples were scattered. The women who had followed him were sitting somewhere trying to figure out what to do with their grief. Everything they had spent three years building their lives around had just fallen apart in public, in the most brutal way possible.

And they just had to sit in it. For a whole day. Not knowing what was coming. Not knowing there was anything coming at all.

I think about that day a lot more than I talk about it.

The In-Between

If you're reading this today, there's a decent chance you know something about that feeling. Not the theological version — I mean the actual feeling of it. The one where you're not sure what you believe anymore, or whether you ever really believed it, or whether the thing you used to have was ever real to begin with. The feeling of sitting in the in-between and not having any reason to think Sunday is coming.

Maybe faith drifted away from you gradually. No big moment, no dramatic exit — you just slowly stopped showing up, stopped praying, stopped feeling like any of it was worth the effort. And somewhere along the way you realized you'd gone further than you meant to.

Or maybe you've never had faith to lose. You're here because someone you love kept asking, or because something in you is still unsettled, and you figured you'd give it one more look before you wrote it off entirely.

Or maybe you've been in church your whole life and everything looks fine from the outside — but honest to God, there are questions you've never let yourself ask out loud because you weren't sure what would happen if you did.

All three of those people are sitting in Saturday right now.

And I want to say something to all three of you, as directly as I can.

You don't have to have it figured out before tomorrow.

They Weren't Ready Either

Here's the thing that gets me about the first Easter. The disciples weren't ready for it. They hadn't resolved their doubt. Peter had denied Jesus three times and hadn't finished processing what that meant about who he was. Thomas hadn't seen anything yet. The women who went to the tomb went there to finish burying someone they loved — not to witness a miracle. They brought spices. They were grieving, not expecting.

They weren't prepared. They weren't cleaned up. They hadn't gotten their faith sorted out first.

And Jesus showed up anyway.

Luke says when Jesus appeared in the room with the disciples — the locked room, the room full of fear and confusion and questions nobody had answers to — the first thing he said was: Peace be with you.

Not "where was your faith?" Not "I told you so." Not "you need to get yourself together before I can deal with you."

Peace be with you.

That's still what he says. To the person who drifted. To the person who's never been sure. To the person who's been going through the motions for so long they can't remember what it felt like to actually believe something.

Peace be with you in the middle of the Saturday feeling.

My Own Saturday

Here's what I know from having spent two years in my own version of Saturday. I resigned my church in 2007, walked away from ministry, told my wife I had to take everything apart and figure out what I actually believed. It was not a clean process. It was not comfortable. There were nights I genuinely wasn't sure there was anything on the other side of it.

But I kept asking the question I'd been avoiding. The one in the center of everything.

Did Jesus actually rise from the dead?

Not as an idea. Not as a helpful metaphor. Actually. Historically. A body that was dead on Friday walking out of a tomb on Sunday.

I pushed on that question as hard as I could push. I read the people who argued against it. I looked for the holes. I wanted to find the thing that would let me put it down cleanly.

I couldn't find it.

And what I found instead — on the other side of two years of honestly looking — was not a doctrine I had finally settled on. It was a person. A person who is actually, presently alive. And that changed not just what I believed, but how I actually live.

I'm not telling you that to sell you on something. I'm telling you because I was the person reading the Saturday blog before Easter, wondering if there was any point in showing up tomorrow. And I want you to know that showing up — even uncertain, even with a full set of questions you haven't resolved — is exactly the right move.

Come as You Are

Tomorrow is Easter at Next Level. April 5th. 10:00 AM. Matthews, North Carolina.

We're not going to ask you to perform certainty you don't have. We're not going to ask you to clean yourself up before you walk in the door. We're starting exactly where the disciples started — in a room full of questions, with a God who walks through locked doors.

Bring whatever you're carrying. Bring the doubt. Bring the drift. Bring the questions you've never said out loud to anyone.

Come as you are.

Sunday is coming.