I struggled to know what to write this month.
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What more is there to say that hasn't already been said, about fear, and isolation and our lives turned upside down?
I wanted to write poetic words about the heroes of our age: nurses, doctors, teachers, grocery store workers, mailmen, garbos, emergency services and charities.
I wanted to acknowledge the pain of jobs lost, and businesses closed. I wanted to name the anxiety that comes from families separated, or victims locked at home with their abusers, or the grief of illness and death.
But every word I wrote felt inadequate to the task.
Then I remembered that this week is Holy Week - the week that Christians recall the last days of Jesus' life. It seems strange, I suppose, that a minister could forget that it is Holy Week, but such are the times we live in now.
At the heart of the Christian faith comes a story that seems every way counterintuitive. It is a story of pain, suffering, grief and death. It is a story of betrayal, and denial and fear. It is a story about how violence and greed and enmity seek to crush hope and love.
It is a story that speaks to the sense of anguish that many of us may be experiencing now. But Easter is also a story of compassion. It is a story of never having to hurt alone: a story of how God, far from causing suffering, enters our brokenness and despair, and suffers with us in the deepest of pits.
And, finally, it is a story of how fragile new life emerges in the very darkest moments (even from the finality of a tomb). I know, it doesn't seem like much. But, maybe it's just enough.