Most of our lives are spent in what one might call Holy Saturday. On most days, we experience not the unbearable misery of Good Friday nor the immeasurable joy of Easter Sunday.

Like the disciples, we wait. We wait for things to improve at work. We wait to find the right person. We wait to get into school. We wait to get pregnant. We wait for the news from the doctor.

The great question is: how do we wait? Do we wait in terror and fear? Do we believe that nothing good will happen and that the deepest desires of our heart will not come true? Do we wait in passivity, believing the lie that fate will design our destiny and thus do nothing?

Or do we wait with hope? Are we like the prophets who “against all hope, hoped still”?

The one who has hope lives differently. They believe that, even in the worst of situations, even in the darkest times, God is at work.

Hope arises through suffering. It emerges most brightly in deprivation and darkness because it offers us a vision that is not limited to what is immediately at hand.

Whether we see it or not, hope is alive. It is alive in anyone who has suffered intense loss and kept moving, who has stepped forward to love another with no promise of a return, who has doubted the existence of God and yet prayed anyway, and who has endured suffering for the sake of another and actually found great strength in doing so.

Part of me wonders if it was hope that powered Jesus’s resurrection from the grave, but all of me knows that it is hope that fuels human redemption in people and communities every day.

Because in the end Easter redemption isn’t just first and foremost a historical event, but also a living reality that allows beauty to be born anew every day amidst the storms of history.