Saturday

I have celebrated a lot of Easters.  Never has the Saturday part of the Easter story been so meaningful to me as this year.  This time around I resonate with how disoriented and lost Jesus's followers must have felt.  They had spent 3 years of discomfort, hope, miracles, and impatience with this man of whom they had high expectations.  Just a few days before Jesus had entered Jerusalem to the sound of thousands of people shouting with excitement.  They also had high expectations. The palm branch-waving crowd and the disciples were imagining a political leader who would release them from their Roman rulers.  

But then Thursday night and Friday happened.  Arrested, tried in a midnight rigged court and sentenced for no crime, Jesus allowed himself to be whipped and crucified.  This was not what Jesus's followers had imagined for his life.  They had had plans! Now those plans were dead along with the mangled body wrapped in spices and cloths and laid on a rock slab in a cave.  

And so we come to Saturday.  A true dead end. The Bible doesn't record what the disciples, who had been full of confidence and hopes for the future, did that day.   The last actions recorded are in the middle of Thursday night all the disciples deserted Jesus and fled; Judas full of remorse, hanged himself; Peter after denying knowing Jesus, was last seen weeping bitterly; John stood at the cross with Jesus's mother Mary and watched Jesus die; two other Marys later watched Jesus's body being placed in the tomb Friday evening.  What dark emotions must have overcome them.  Confusion, disorientation, regret, shame, discouragement, sorrow, loss of purpose, fear, and more.  Imagine the questions swirling in their minds!   "How, did this happen?"  "why did this happen?" "now what?"

Our plans with Skagua seem to have encountered a similar place. We are asking all of the above questions.  We are still in our Saturday wondering what will emerge from the death of our plans.

Thank God for Easter Sunday, though!  When his followers saw Jesus restored to life with a new body, it was like a million Ah Ha moments at once. This defeater of death hadn't showed up to save their one people group from one oppressive other people group.   In fact, Jesus had come to save all of human kind from the greatest oppression of all: spiritual death. 

So, this is what our hope is in.  Not in our ability to reinvent our own plans. Our hope is in Jesus whose plans are greater than anything we could imagine is working on something.  

While we wait for our dream to be given a new body better than before, this is what we have been doing: gathering information about what options we have with working with other organizations in the Pacific; continuing to work on moving out of our house and onto Skagua; the girls and I took an Easter trip to Colorado to visit family; Brian took a trip to the mountains to snowboard.; and Brian is also working on getting the electrical system updated on Skagua.  On top of this, yesterday, Brian moved Skagua out of the Moss Landing harbor up to anchor off of the Santa Cruz wharf.