We went to the hospital on Tuesday. She was born on Thursday. We came home Sunday.

The traumatic, miraculous week of our first daughter’s entry into the world is a fixed part of my wife’s and my calendar. The disorienting circumstances so rearranged our souls that the days of one particular October will never lose their immediacy. When recounting those events, we need no more to be transported back than to refer to the names of the days of the week. 

I’ve heard others talk this way when sharing their own stories, with painful recollections seemingly cemented as the days of the week on which they occurred. I wonder if the people most shattered by 9/11 don’t just call it “Tuesday”…

If a wound goes deep enough, it might never fully heal, or ever fully “go away.” If a break is bad enough, you might never walk without the limp. Cruelly, trauma has triggers like seasons have traditions: your surroundings can remind you exactly how you felt the last time you were in this place. The familiarity brings it all rushing back—a beautiful thing in the case of Christmas foods, a haunting one in the case of pain.

What if the tragedy went deep enough that the only trigger needed to revive it was a sunrise? What if the sorrow drove so deeply into the heart that every Tuesday, you lived it over again? 

I’m fascinated by the concept that we cosmically journey through memories and emotions as our planet again revolves the sun; I think I’m only on the brink of understanding how pain could shrink your personal solar system down to a cycle of relived memories every seven days.

And so I say: Thank you, God, for Easter. Thank you, Jesus, for leaving your grave. 

A New Creation Week

It started on Sunday, when Jesus knowingly set his course for Jerusalem and entered the city. It was Wednesday when Judas agreed to betray him. On Thursday, Jesus laid out his mission in full to his closest friends and gave them a sacred tradition to share and remember him through the ages. Friday, he was crucified. Saturday, there was darkness. 

But on Sunday, a new creation began.

“Creation” is the perfect word for what Resurrection Sunday started: a new world governed by a new time, not unlike the inaugural seven days of our universe did the first time around. 

Tragedy may have the power to warp time around its awful gravity, but eucatastrophe can do something wholly different. That joyous, sudden, unexpected inbreaking of hope doesn’t simply bend or twist the time that already exists: it recreates it. Out of something fallen, a miracle makes something new and glorious. 

Easter isn’t just a holiday, a celebratory season with a special calendar day all to itself once per year. The Resurrection both culminates and mysteriously begins a new time, a new rhythm, a new creation—but it doesn’t achieve this by abolishing the old. The old stories and struggles and scars make this new creation what it is. Indeed, consider what transpired those seven days of Holy Week before the Eighth Day, Resurrection Sunday: betrayal, abandonment, suffering, and death. 

The new creation doesn’t make a new rhythm for existence quite like the first creation did, out of nothing. The Sunday-through-Saturday tempo we live in now carries a memory of God’s Love as deep as any wound, because it remembers the time God’s love descended into the depths of every wound. 

May God give grace for each of our wounded Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays to—somehow, someday—be lived in the resurrected rhythm of his new creation.