“A neighborly life marinates in the Saturday life.”
-Alexandra Kuykendall, Loving My Actual Neighbor
Holy Saturday falls between two days: Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
On one side is the grief of the cross, the sin of humanity that required reconciliation through Jesus. The hard of living on this earth as it operates in a broken state. On the other side is Jesus’s resurrection, the hope that has overcome the world. Our future and our joy. We stand today smack dab in between these two realities.
We are souls that temporarily walk this planet. We are here for but a brief moment. We walk these days tethered to both sides. Saturday Living, as I call it in my new book, is recognizing that we are living in this in between. As followers of Christ we don’t escape the very real pain that life brings and we have hope found in Jesus. We hold this tension for ourselves and for our “neighbors” when we love them well.
I live in Denver, where today we are collectively remembering the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School. Twenty years ago to this very day the world watched and cried and shook our collective head at what kind of horror was playing out in a school during a lunch hour. Video footage and stories that shook our sense of safety in a new way. Twenty years later and the echoes of grief are palpable still in our community.
On this Holy Saturday, we don’t have to look far to know the world is not as it should be.
And in our everyday, ordinary lives there are people all around us who are experiencing their own ramifications of a broken world. Cancer, divorce, and addiction are all within arm’s reach in my own circle of friends. This is why the cross had to happen.
As preacher Tony Campolo is famous for saying, “It’s Friday… but Sunday’s coming.” Unlike the original disciples, we know the good news that is the end of this story. We know the hope that Sunday brings. And yet here we still are on Holy Saturday, we can’t rush through it. We stand in the tension tethered to both sides.
A “Call to Saturday Living” is to not overlook Friday to rush to the happy of Sunday. Nor is it a despair found in the Friday headlines so we forget the Sunday good news. It is remembering both. Here we operate as souls on earth in the in between. Surrounded by fellow souls who are also in this Saturday space. Our job is to stay tethered to both sides as we love our neighbors, to be with them in the grief of a sin-soaked world and hold out the hope that Easter brings.
Our call every day is really a call to Saturday Living.
– Alexandra
If you’d like to receive Alexandra’s challenge to a call to Saturday living, get her new book Loving My Actual Neighbor.
Really lovely video and message.
Don’t you love it when God brings together the same message from different angles, confirming His truth, and maybe getting our attention where it needs to be? That’s what happened when I read this article.
Saturday Living. The Serenity Prayer (on the Mental Health Grace Alliance website). Realistic but hopeful (from my blog post at https://thosewhoweep.blogspot.com/2018/07/realistic-but-hopeful.html). They all express the same message in different words.
I have this tendency to go to extremes in my thinking. To live in the grief of the cross, to obsess about the things I cannot change, to be realistic to the point of seeing no hope. Or to do the opposite: to rush to the happy of Sunday, to think I have everything under control, to be hopeful to the point of forgetting that in real life bad things can happen.
Standing in the tension tethered to both sides is so important and so helpful to me. As the Grace Alliance article points out, mental health research has confirmed that it’s the healthiest way to live.
Thank you for this call to Saturday Living. No matter how many times I hear it, I still need to hear it again.