I got up in the middle of the night to prepare burial spices—
Ready to mourn and grieve.
It was pitch black,
Like the absolute joylessness I felt.
I had been duped.
I had been believing a lie.
I was ashamed at what would others think of me,
Now that it was obvious that everything I had centered my life around had come crumbling down.
I was grieving—
For this friend whom I had loved,
For this friend whom I had trusted,
For this friend who didn’t exist anymore.
I was confused,
And angry,
And absolutely joyless.
So I prepared my burial spices—
To honor a now lifeless symbol that I had once clung so tightly to.
Facts were facts.
He was dead.
And, with Him, everything I had believed in.
So I got up in the dark and prepared some burial spices for His lifeless body.
And I walked in the darkness with those burial spices.
And as I got closer, I was suddenly frustrated,
Wondering who was going to roll that damned stone away.
That stone was sitting in front of all the death
That I was going to finalize and certify and maybe eventually make peace with.
I couldn’t roll it away by myself,
Even if I tried for a thousand years.
There it would be when I got to the grave,
Taunting me.
Here I am—mourning, grieving,
Just trying to make peace with the death that's going on—
The death that had happened to my friend, the death that’s happening inside me.
Here I am, just trying to use up these burial spices,
That tenderness that’s still left in my soul towards the friend who doesn’t exist anymore,
The friend who tricked me and gave me hope and then died.
Here I am, trying to use up all these spices,
But it looks like when I leave today, I’ll leave with a jar full of burial spices—
With nowhere to put them, but still filled with the grief.
Then all at once, I wonder if I’m delusional again,
Because I see things change.
As I walk, the sky goes from black,
To grey,
To pale blue,
Till finally there is a band of orange on the horizon.
And the tomb is in the middle of a garden.
And the ground shakes in the most cataclysmic sign I’ve ever seen—
Well, the most cataclysmic signs I’ve seen since the day that my friend died.
And the earthquake is so violent that I drop my burial spices.
And, for some reason, the stone is gone.
I can make my peace in peace
And move on.
But, just like the stone, so, too, is the body.
Gone.
I’m not convinced of anything.
But I have to go see what happened.
Then, I can either make my peace, or be surprised by something incredible.
So I’m going to go see what happened.
And I’m going to let my burial spices stay on the ground.
Because I’m not sure what to do with them.