"Good" Friday: considering loss, in light of the cross

the monthly letter

Growing up, I was convinced the sun never came out on Good Friday (except for the year I was in Hilton Head, South Carolina, for spring break—apparently, God has different weather messages for you Southerners).

Though it may have been only one or two years, I remember it as if it was every year of my youth: my mom would require us to turn off the lights and keep as quiet as we could in the afternoon hours of Good Friday in remembrance of Jesus’ last gulps of air. No television or radio or CD players — just silence … back when silence wasn’t so daunting or rare.

And that evening, we’d walk the stations of the cross at our parish. Carved wooden etchings of Jesus’ last days hung on the walls around the church as we heard the scriptural account of His road to His own wood-splintered death.

I didn’t love church growing up — but I loved Good Friday, and I still don’t know why, except that maybe I found shape and outward expression for this God-man I knew (deep within me) was real.

And yet, the outward expression I loved wasn’t celebratory and joyful; it commemorated His death. I still remember the Easter outfit I got when I was eight, and we went to Chicago for Easter weekend. Resurrection Sunday held about equal weight to me as those annual outfits. I loved them when I wore them, and then I mostly forgot them.

But I still feel connected to the stations of the cross and those silent Good Fridays.

This day and the cavernous Saturday between today and Sunday’s resurrection celebration have a summons for us. In our remembrance of His death, we can also remind ourselves of what He told his disciples in Matthew 16:

“Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (verses 24-25).

The cross was unto our salvation. The cross was the answer to the world’s greatest strife. That wooden beam made God accessible to my depraved soul.

And the cross would also be mine, to carry.

Many of you are new here, thanks to The Gift of Limitations, but we have some hearty old faithfuls in SOAR. If this is you, you may remember me writing and speaking from a place of profound grief two winters ago. Nate and I have experienced a loss we couldn’t have imagined, loss we’re still waking into and falling asleep with each night.

We met our cross.

(Well, one of them.)

And while I memorized Matthew 16:24-25 as a part of the Topical Memory System when I was nineteen, I had no idea that the “cross” Jesus referred to here didn’t mean great exploits for God (that looked like sacrifice but could be positioned as Instagram-ready celebrations of me and my effort) … but would instead mean the end of holy dreams and godly desires — the end of really, really good things. I didn’t know the cross could feel like death on my shoulders and shards of bark in my back and head-thumping grief.

But the older I get, the more I look around me, and I realize that my neighbor, my best friend, and the women and men who stand alongside me on the soccer sidelines are all beginning to walk a similar Via Dolorosa.

For some, it is a profound and inexplicable loss, and for others, it is dozens or more of “little” losses that amount to the marching reminder that our lives are not our own.

So on this “Good Friday,” when the clouds have broken a bit since we first experienced the loss of which I write, I have the gift of perspective that comes after a long season of grief:

God shared His cross with me.

(Gulp.)

And that is good.

I know in my bones that the parts of my life I’ve lost (that I actually didn’t deny, but that God, in His mercy, denied for me) have been unto a more significant finding.

Some of you reading this, and who are further down the road than me, are nodding your heads. Others have tissues stuffed in your pockets and bags under your eyes — the cross feels heavy on your back and unrelenting. Still, others have drips of loss, but you may wonder if dozens of “small” losses make up a crossbeam as you read. (I personally think they do). And finally, some of you are like I was and hope to evade great loss and still (somehow) identify with the cross. And maybe you can; I don’t know.

But today, on this dark Good Friday, I see the sun streaks through the clouds. I see more of His life available to me than I ever knew I could when my eyes were bloodshot and tired from the unrelenting stare at what I thought I might lose (because I didn’t realize that if I lost what I never wanted to lose, He would hold me … and I would be okay).

God shared His cross with me.

And He saved my life, out of this loss.

This Friday … today … for all of us really is good.

Until next time,

Sara