Good Friday

5 minutes until time to go to the Good Friday service at our church. Anna and I are singing in the choir. I'm hurriedly trying to get my hair to curl, put on makeup, pretend I'm 20 lbs. lighter...

And Dave appears at the bathroom door: "I can't go."

sigh.

I know he can't go. But in my oblivion, my strivings at patching the pain, my attempt to go on as if life is normal, I've forgotten that he will want to go. That he will try to go. That he will have to go through the pain, once again, of realizing he can't go with us. The pain of sitting, the dizziness and headaches from all the perfumes, the difficulty concentrating...it's all too much. His wife and daughter in the choir and he is forced to be separated from us. On Easter, I'm also in the orchestra, and he can't hear it.

He hears me practice strains of harmony that hang tenuously in the air. A jazz version of Christ Has Risen, a thread of music that makes no sense without its tapestry. A hymn without the depth of chords and words. The notes mimic our lives and mock his pain, taunting him that he can't see more than a thread of the tapestry God is weaving, and how easily a thread could break...

5 minutes until time to go, and I have forgotten our lives have fallen apart, and I have nothing to put them together with, and no time to do it. We remember there's another practice before the service on Sunday. Maybe he can go to that. Maybe.

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? The words of a broken Savior, dying on the cross. Words we can understand, relate to, cry with, draw close to God with. And yet, a lonely strain of harmony hangs in the air. By contrast, Jesus was broken for a reason. This life, this thread of suffering...is without tapestry. Satan would have us believe it is woven into the Emporer's New Clothes. A facade, a nothingness. In Christ we become holy, clothed for the first time in our lives--we gain a tapestry we could never weave.

For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. --2 Cor 5:4-54

Clinging to the Spirit, for He is all we have, Merry