Holy week, beginning with Palm Sunday through Good Friday and to Easter Sunday is the most honest model for our human spiritual existence. One moment, we are celebrating life and all its wondrous possibilities. The beauty of it all catches our breath in awe. The next, we are soul-gutted, mourning for the goodness that has abandoned us. We have seasons of breakdown, waiting, waiting, waiting—and then remarkable breakthroughs. There are moments of impossible love when we feel gloriously seen. We know we matter. And then there are the Garden of Gethsemane dark nights of the soul. We feel so alone. The pain nearly takes our breath away.

The tension I feel during Holy Week and in my mortal existence is the fact that joy and sorrow are forever braided together in my life and yours. You cannot have one without the other. Mary Oliver calls it the “stone hard beauty of everything.” Earth is not heaven. We live in a fragile, imperfect world (but still God’s world) that will have us celebrating on Palm Sunday, mourning on Good Friday, and then rising on Easter Sunday. We will repeat the pattern a multitude of times over our lifetime.

My story, your story, God’s story—unfolds in ways we cannot predict, prepare for, or ever fully understand. The good news is that God already gave away the epilogue. We know how every story ends. Or actually doesn’t end. From the cross, Jesus turned to the gentleman next to him and said, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

The posture of faith (of Jesus) is to hold all of it—the blessed and the broken—lightly. Trust the divine process. Live with confidence. God always comes through. The pattern of hope is undeniable. Through it all, we are held, just as Jesus was held, underneath the Everlasting Arms.

Hold on! Do you need to hear it? I sure need to hear it.

Hold on!

Easter is coming for us all.