Good Friday! I sent a few Easter cards this week and just finished one to a forty (plus) year friend. Allisa and I met in grade school and have swum life’s lazy river lily pads and whitewater rafting currents. During Easter fasting, praying, and preparation, I realize she is a three-day Easter friend.

Allisa and I have faced Good Fridays: situational crosses, carrying heart burdens up steep hills, being ‘Veronica’ to wipe each other’s tears, pulling thorns from our crown of dreams. We’ve spent Holy Saturdays waiting for understanding, reconciliation, and bitter stings from Good Fridays to be healed. We’ve graciously celebrated Easter Sunday’s mountaintop vistas, brighter light, resurrected openings after dark dank boulders have moved.

Out of the Easter Triduum, I’ve learned a few lessons about Holy Saturday. Ironically, a Saturday season is when I’ve learned the most. There’s no way I can wrap my FROG legs around the intensity of Good Friday. In my Good Friday-like moments, I identify with the fight or flight experience. I comprehend pain. It’s tangible. It’s in my face.

I can’t fully fathom Easter morning until I get to heaven to see it from God’s perspective. I’ve been blessed with times of extreme hope, wisdom, joy, supernatural peace. Those resurrection moments propel me. I bask in the intense light of spiritual soaring. Like Good Friday, Easter moments are tangible. They’re in my face.

However, smack dab in the middle of crucifixion and resurrection is Saturday. How do I paddle in that seemingly lukewarm body of water? There’s nothing to see per se beyond a memory of past and hope for the future. What about pain in the night but joy comes in the morning? (Ps. 30:5). What happens when morning after morning I wake with no sign whatsoever of joy? How do I remain hopeful as I strain my bruised neck from Friday to anticipate Sunday? What about a waiting period that expands from doorstep to doorstop?

Whether I feel like it or not, I rely on the promise from Hab. 2:3 during Holy Saturdays: “For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it lingers, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.”

Allisa and I are like Easter perennials in a trifecta of soil. We’ve been repeatedly tilled, habitually planted, and gratefully harvested. I pray you have or will find an all-season porch friend in your spiritual Easter basket today!

Lessons and blessin’s from a three-leaf lily pad, Christina

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