As I was driving home from our Good Friday service last night I thought back to the drives home from the cemetery where my father and mother were buried.

It’s hard to describe the finality, loss, and the feeling of they’re-never-coming-back, fighting the creeping desperation of hoping it’s all a dream and they really aren’t gone — the kicked-in-the-gut feeling that life will never be the same from this point forward.   The days following their deaths seemed to drag like a dream of being immovably mired in mud.

I still miss them and think of them often, occasionally seeing them in a dream or mistaking them for someone in a crowd.  I’m sure these are natural reactions to grief, both short and long term.  Time heals and life goes on, but the loss remains.

I imagined Jesus’s followers having similar, if not more intense, feelings as He was taken down off the cross and laid in the tomb.  Hopes dashed, a good man cut down in his prime, a deliverer defeated.  “Messiah?  Yeah, right.”   Life was never going to be the same now that he’s gone.   Three   l-o-n-g   days . . . .