When we anticipated Lent this year, I felt hopeful – maybe an odd emotion for the season, but we were in the throes of late summer. As for our family, we live nearly at the bottom of the African continent, and our mornings were just beginning to start later, with a chilly air, prompting my daughters to call for a fire! please! The coming of autumn was imminent in these later sunrises and earlier sunsets, and in the final hoorah of my vegetable garden. By the time we reach Easter, we will be fully into the pumpkin-laden season (I’ve often wondered if pumpkin pie might be a more appropriate Easter dessert for us, here).

So, I walked into Lent feeling hopeful about not just the changing season, but also hesitantly optimistic about the beginning of a new family season. Lent, a season that has traditionally focused on the coming of the light, the lengthening of the days, is one where I have struggled in past years to find a rhythm that fits, that makes sense, in the darkening of our days, in the chilling of the air. This year, though, we were ready for it.

But then on Ash Wednesday, I found myself in the ER, my body undergoing slews of tests and the attitudes of the nurses slowly shifting from ambivalence to concern of creased eyebrows and whispered glances my way. What we hoped would be perhaps a simple infection (antibiotics?), or … something else … was instead a large mass wreaking havoc on my internal organs. More doctors were called in, needed to get involved. Surgery was scheduled, another x-ray done to show me better the situation. Is this the only option? We asked. The doctors all nodded. No decisions to be made here.

Two days later, I lay awake in the middle of the night, willing the nausea from all the anesthesia to dissipate so I could sit up, maybe even get up. I contemplated this body, that has been slowly breaking down and decaying since it’s birth into this life thirty-eight years ago. I felt the incisions, the internal hole where one organ used to be. I thought of others who have endured so many surgeries, so much medical intervention. I felt deeply, more deeply than in past years when the ashes smeared my forehead, that “for dust you are and to dust you will return.”¹

There wasn’t time in the end, really, to feel that intense anxiety that comes with testing a mass. Graciously, my doctor pushed through the sample, pulled the strings, and we knew by the next afternoon that we were not facing cancer. It was amazing, extremely rare, they said, to have a mass of that size turn out to be benign. We rejoiced – gratitude filling our hearts and feeling like we could breath deeply again. Somehow, God in his sovereignty saw fit to protect me from further disease. All I needed to do was heal.

Just as I was healing, three days fresh from surgery, death invaded our community. A good friend lost her husband, my daughter’s best friends lost their father. How, God? We cried, visceral weeping. It can’t be real, he can’t be gone. We leapt into crisis mode, helping however was needed. And all the time, I was asking, but God… to spare me, and take him? The same hospital that had removed my dangerous mass received his dying body. The same friend who had leapt into action during my surgery now received my weakened hugs and support. How did you see fit, Jesus, to heal me, and not him? And yet, we know – his death is his gain – he is rejoicing with Christ. We are the poor ones.

This year, Lent has carried an unanticipated awareness and experience with death and decaying bodies. It has been heavy, dark, deep in grief, and full of longing – for Christ to make things right, for tears to all be wiped away, for no more death and decay, for endless light and life.

This Good Friday, I look to Jesus on the cross with streaming eyes. We feel the sting of death, and we know it has been defeated.² We feel the decaying of our bodies, and yet plow forward in laboring for the Lord. We weep and grieve now, and hold in hope that joy will come in the morning – when you make it all right again, Jesus.

Easter is around the corner. Yes, today we sit in the depths of all that Jesus’ death means, of all that living in this broken world means. And we know that come Sunday, Jesus will have slayed death – it is done! And we will rejoice, with hurting hearts, standing firm in hope.

1. Genesis 3:19 ↩︎
2. 1 Corinthians 15 ↩︎