It was late when Brian got home from worship band practice. He’d been at church that Maundy Thursday night for hours, practicing for Sunday—Easter Sunday. And he came home to find his put-together, I-work-in-Christian-publishing, I-lead-ministry wife bleary-eyed, bawling, and inebriated, with her head hanging over the side of the porcelain throne.
Without any judgment or snide comments or anger, he immediately knelt down next to me. He held my hair back with one hand and rubbed my back with the other, telling me how much he loved me and that it was all going to be okay.
I didn’t believe him; my world was a spinning mess of pain and shame I couldn’t stop.
*
Easter has always been a more nebulous holiday for me. On a knowledge-level, I get it. I fully believe Christ’s death and resurrection were watershed events in history; I fully believe they gave us a future Hope worth celebrating.
But on a heart level, it feels so intangible. Because we don’t always talk about the ways they change the messy middle we find ourselves in every day.
We tend to equate Christ’s death and resurrection with eternal life—and a lot of the time, we leave it at that. We want to make Easter a once-a-year sermon, a sound byte, a pithy marketing meme. But there is no way to experience the full beauty of Handel’s Messiah in 15 seconds. You can’t know the masterful depths of War and Peace by one quote.
And yet that’s exactly what we want to do with the cross.
*
While Brian was at church, I poured Crystal Light powder directly into a Costco-sized bottle of vodka and watched trashy reality TV until the world became blurry.
Earlier that day we had found out that yet another infertility treatment was unsuccessful.
The discovery came on the heels of several other hard blows for me. I felt powerless and without recourse. Like it was all my fault, that I was failing at everything. At life. And I loathed myself for it.
That night, draped unceremoniously across the toilet, I eventually ran myself dry.
Less than 24 hours later I was at the Good Friday service, singing about amazing grace in a room as dark as I felt inside. I stared at the life-sized cross in front of the stage as my voice gave out. Any pretense or self-made armor I had I’d lost in the bathroom the night before. And I could finally, fully, feel the deep, deep Truth and Beauty of the cross like a cool balm against the burning cuts and slashes of my brokenness.
I sobbed and stumbled my way forward in the dark to the foot of the cross, knowing the Mystery was at work in me—that someway, somehow, in all my mess and pain, Redemption was making me new even now.
*
When I think about the idea of “Christ in you,” Easter becomes more personal. And while we tend to emphasize the incredible benefits of Christ in us—authority, power, victory, the fruit of the Spirit—we often fail to think about the reverse.
Through Christ, we have access to all of God and His goodness—and He has access to all of us. Our hurts and heartaches and betrayals and lies and depression and desperation and joy and happiness and anger and brokenness. “Christ in you” means he feels all the things we feel. He experiences what we experience.
When I was abused, he was abused. Which sounds a little heretical. Yet he said “what you do to the least of these you do also to me.” It wasn’t an abstract speech about the spirit in which we do things. He was talking about the physical: feeding and clothing and taking care of—or oppressing and taking advantage of.
When we abide in Christ, He abides in us. We are never alone. He endures what we cannot. When I broke down and disassociated through drinking and trashy TV, He was there, feeling all the hurt my physical, human mind and body couldn’t bear anymore.
The transaction of the cross is this: we give him all the blackness of our souls, all the agony and evil we experience in this broken world. And He gives us Redemption.
*
On another Maundy Thursday, five years after the night Brian held my hair back, he held my hand as I gave birth to our second son.
Once again, my world was pain, and then I heard Brian exclaim, “It’s a boy!” There was a flurry of activity and then the nurse was handing me a miracle wrapped in a blanket. I was in awe; I saw perfection in his chubby cheeks and adorably smooshed nose. I snuggled him tightly, his new body solid and hot against my skin. The pain was still there, but it paled in comparison to the joy I felt as I kissed his forehead. I wanted to freeze this moment with his tiny fingers wrapped around mine.
That night, the weight of Glory was 7.8 pounds.
This is Redemption.
This is the finished work of the cross.
*
I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve found myself at the foot of the Lord’s throne, my world once again messy and spinning out of control. And all my brokenness and shame and pain and fear heave to the surface as I empty myself at His feet.
And time and again He kneels down next to me. He holds me and tells me that He loves me. That it’s all going to be okay.
And I am learning to believe Him. I am learning how to stay in His presence when my fallen nature wants to run and hide.
And it’s the cross that makes this possible. The death and resurrection of Christ are fixed points in time that reach into every moment of time. Yes, He came to take away our sins and give us everlasting life. But we can miss the fullness of His sacrifice when we fail to see that His redemption permeates every moment of our lives. We don’t need to wait until our deathbed to experience His unending goodness. We can access it right now. No matter our circumstances.
I still don’t understand it all—the work of the cross is more full and more layered and more mysterious than my finite mind is capable of comprehending. Yet the Bible doesn’t say we need to comprehend; it says we need faith like a child.
And so, with the simple awe and wonder of a child, I will choose to believe we have a Savior who enters into the messy middle with us, who redeems all things and makes all things new, even now. Who holds our baggage so our hands are free to take the hand of our good Father and receive the gifts—past, present, and future—He has for us.
This is the Good News I want my life to display.
This is just a taste of the work of Christ and the cross I want to boast about.
***
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