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.