Resting in the Tension

A Holy Saturday Reflection

“Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment.”

— Luke 23:56

Holy Saturday is the day we rarely talk about. Good Friday has its gravity, Resurrection Sunday its glory. But Holy Saturday—this space between sorrow and resurrection—feels quieter. Unsettling. It asks us to sit in the silence between grief and glory, between what has ended and what has not yet begun.

The world goes dark, the earth shakes, and Christ cries out, “It is finished.” From every angle, it looks like evil has won. That death has the final word. And yet, tucked into the Gospel account, is this quiet sentence: “They rested.” Even as their hearts broke and the future felt uncertain, they rested—honoring Sabbath, honoring their usual rhythm, honoring God, even when He seemed absent.

Honestly, I find this tension much more familiar to daily life than we usually admit. We experience the hard and the heavy—globally, locally, personally—while we’re also baking bread, folding laundry, sending emails. Sometimes the disconnect is dizzying. At times there’s a part of me that wants to shout: Can we please stop pretending everything is fine?

How do we hold space for it all—the beauty and the brutality, the wonder and the wounds, the love and the loss?

We feel the ache. We sense the dissonance of a world where children laugh and sirens wail at the same time.

So how do we witness it all, feel it deeply, and still keep living?

Holy Saturday gives us a path:

We rest. We trust. We wait.

But rest isn’t passive. It’s not indifference or escape. Rest, in the Holy Saturday kind of way, is a form of defiant faith. A sacred choice to pause, to honor, to hope—even when everything tells us not to.

We’re still here. And we can’t ignore the hard and the heavy all around us—or within us. We can’t pretend it’s fine, or press on numbly. But we can choose to live with purpose, on a mission in light of it all.

We can choose intentionality, creativity, and joy as expressions of holy resistance.

This is what Holy Saturday has taught me:

The pause doesn’t mean we’ve given up.

It means we are waiting with faith, hope, and reverent anticipation.

What do we do in a world that holds both beauty and brutality, side by side?

We cry, we grieve, we lament.

And we love, we grow, we create.

We rest, we receive, and we rise.

Because we carry a faith that stands defiant in the face of devastation.

We choose to keep creating, to keep loving, to keep hoping—not because the pain isn’t real, but because resurrection is.

In the waiting, in the weariness, in the weight of everything still unresolved, we practice resurrection.

Not because the world is fine—but because we believe it will be.

Not because our pain is gone—but because our hope is alive.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

— 1 Peter 1:3

So today, on Holy Saturday, we pause with Jesus in the tomb—not in despair, but in defiant hope.

We sit in the quiet.

We let the ache be what it is.

And we rest in the dark—not because the pain is gone, but because hope is alive.

The dawning of His arrival is nearer than we know.

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If you're feeling the tension today—you're not alone. May you find space to rest, to breathe, and to hope again. Resurrection is coming.