She smiled, stuffing my purchase into a bag, exclaiming, "Really? I celebrate mine this week, too! It's on Friday."
"Oh, great! Hey, that's Good Friday!" I remarked.
The corners of her mouth pulled to one side.
"Yeah. But I guess it's only 'good' depending on how you look at it," she said, her voice observing the gravity of the day.
I smiled and wished her a happy birthday, collected my purchase, and walked out, giving ample thought to her phrasing.
Was she right?
This day of Holy Week is, after all, the day that Jesus suffered and died.
What is so good about it?
~~
I wanted the miracle.
Isn't that what everybody wants?
And not just because I wanted my circumstances to improve--I wanted to see God Himself intervene in a mighty way, in a way that everyone would know:
Surely, God is real.
I was chasing after God and His promises, begging Him to have mercy on me, that He might lighten my load and allow joy to reenter my heart. I wanted nothing more than to feel God, see God, experience His majesty and power.
I was dedicated in prayer but often felt like everything I said bounced against my ceiling and shot right back like a boomerang into my lap.
The harder I prayed, the harder things got, which made it harder to pray.
When nothing budged or changed, the only solution I could fathom was that if God was real (and I certainly believed He was) and if He was really going to restore and redeem my situation (something I was altogether less sure of), then He would have to deliver a miracle.
Plain and simple.
It's not typical that any of us pray for anything else.
Someone is sick?
Please pray that Mr. Johnson's sickness goes away completely and that he is healed.
Someone can't get pregnant?
Please pray that Susie gives birth to a healthy baby.
Someone is dying?
Please pray that the doctors can think of something to do!
So when I stared down the tunnel of divorce--something that scared me to death and hurt me--naturally, I couldn't consider praying for anything less than a miracle:
Please, Lord, put my marriage back together.
It was an honest prayer from a heart that wanted to do what she thought was right. I didn't want to do the wrong thing or screw up Harlow's life. I didn't want the label or the stigma.
I didn't want any of it.
But let's be honest--the miracles, they don't just happen to anyone. Husbands don't just come back changed. Babies diagnosed with fatal diseases almost always die. Terminal illnesses take their patients.
Usually, when the odds are against you, even if you are a believer, your situation is sunk.
At that point in time, if my first marriage had been a human, it would have been flatlining and being embalmed. I clung to it for seven months, but it didn't even have a pulse.
And we know that when there's no pulse, you have to call it:
Time of death: October 26, 2013 at 5:30 pm.
I had hoped that my prayers and my hopes would breathe fresh breath into a rotting corpse.
"Do I let it drown?" I wrote in my journal. "Or do I wait patiently, hoping You will roll the stone away?"
While I believed in God and His Word, I struggled with how I should pray.
Was I supposed to pray for a miracle?
One night, while I was skimming through articles online about how to pray during hard times, I came across a mother's blog, where she had written about her experience with losing an infant.
She had known her baby would die from a prenatal diagnosis, so she prayed for the only miracle she could think of--that God would heal her baby and her baby would live.
But as the hours grew short, she said that she realized her miracle wasn't going to happen.
So she stopped asking for healing and began asking that she might make the most out of the last moments she had with that baby.
That was a miracle God delivered before the baby peacefully went.
I sat crying over her story, moved by her account but deathly afraid of the notion that it was possible that God wasn't going to come through like I thought He would.
This might really happen.
After all I had tried to do. After all the prayers and sleepless nights.
I was supposed to believe that my "miracle" would turn out to be a divorce?
I hated the idea because it made God seem so little. It wasn't the first time that I began to question whether or not He was really in charge if He'd really let the divorce happen.
My terms, God, or it isn't really an answered prayer. And it's certainly not a miracle.
But the days and months continued without a sign of life in my situation, and as the time drew near, I realized, my miracle wasn't going to happen.
Everything I had known silently slipped away without a struggle or a gasp, and just like that, it was gone.
Was it good? Hardly.
I had never hurt so much in my life. I had never been so afraid or treated so unfairly.
And if you had asked me while I had sat in the ruins of a life lost if God had delivered a miracle, my answer would have ached in the negative.
I felt like all that was good and right in the world had lost just from looking at my circumstances. Where was the justice? The reasoning? The purpose?
The truth was:
God
Wasn't
Done.
~~
This week, I've been extremely reflective on the last days of Jesus. My penchant is to sit with him in the Garden of Gethsemane--on the cusp of betrayal, physical pain, and death. He knows what's coming, and he is afraid.
And I take great comfort that even God in the flesh prayed for the miracle when his world crumbled around him.
"Lord, please take this cup from me. But not my will but Yours be done."
Salvation was in the working, but pain was on deck, ready for its closeup in the role of redemption.
It was awful. Nearly everyone he loved turned their backs on him. He was alone. Arrested for nothing. Sold for silver. Beaten. Humiliated. Spit on. Nailed. Hung. Left.
Forsaken. Even God couldn't look at him.
And then, he died.
Hardly a miracle by our standards.
But for whatever reason, God was firm that that was the way it had to happen.
God wanted you, and He gave it all to have you.
I wonder if, while Mary held her lifeless son and Lord, did her face become awash with numbness?
Did she stop believing, even for a moment?
Her Miracle was dead in her arms.
God, what are You going to do now?
BUT GOD WASN'T DONE!!
I like to think that in His almighty way, He remained on the throne with great reverence as He allowed evil to have its way, to do whatever it wanted to His Son. Allowing them to think that He had lost the greatest war that had ever been waged in the heavenly and earthly realms.
And all the while, perhaps He was muttering under His breath, "Go ahead. Do what you like. Do what passion engages you to complete. Hurt Me. Betray Me. Kill Me. But nothing is going to mess up what I have planned!"
Did His patience give out when the midnight hour struck to welcome Sunday?
Could He hardly contain His excitement?
To resurrect His Son?
To bring hope to the world?
Did He sneak to the tomb at the earliest possible minute to whisper the stone away? To cradle Jesus in His arms and breathe the breath of resurrection upon his body?
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of the tomb when death fell away and the miracle was complete!
For the miracle only ended at the tomb--it began in the Garden with a kiss of betrayal.
Do you dare to see? Do you dare to open your eyes to the greater picture God has?
God couldn't have saved us unless the pain happened, unless death had occurred.
First comes the pain. Only then can God usher in the miracle!
I had wanted a miracle--do you? Whatever harm or death or fear you face, my prayer is that you understand that while God could do a preemptive strike and protect you from any pain,
Pain is the stuff miracles are made of.
And maybe your miracle isn't avoiding death but experiencing it, so that God can bring you back to life.
Did my divorce feel like a miracle at the time? Hardly. But as I stand ready as a bride-to-be with a redeemed life, a new family, loved beyond measure, knowing infinitely more about my Savior than I ever could have dreamed before,
I can't see that God delivered anything less than a miracle.
From one resurrected life to another, I hope that this weekend that reminds us of his suffering will enable you to rejoice.
After all, it is a good Friday.
Depending on how you look at it.
