Resurrection on Weekdays and Weak Days

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Once, on an Easter morning, I found myself wondering out loud: what if Easter were more than a single day in our lives? What if it became a season we lived? For don’t we stand—indeed, the whole world stands—at the opened door of something new, something powerful waiting to be welcomed? And surely the encouragement of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead isn’t meant only for one Sunday.

I thought, too, how many of us find meaning in disciplines for Lent—things we do without, the fasting we take on, perhaps good deeds we decide to add. We get intentional. But then Easter morning arrives, radiant, to be sure, but how quickly it’s over. Why not adopt an Easter discipline? Why not “practice resurrection,” as the poet Wendell Berry put it?

I’ve been asking, then, What are some ways to get intentional about observing what the church for centuries has called the Great Fifty Days of Easter. How about some habits appropriate for that season?

As in: Live with less fear and more joy—even if it’s haltingly? Maybe pick up the smart phone fewer times so we doomscroll that much less? Why not greet a seemingly impossible conversation with a little more trust? Or soak our weakness and weariness in images of Jesus’s risen reality? And yes, such new habits may not come readily. Yes, they may take practice. But wouldn’t they give what we face a new lift?

I think about these matters especially when I pause to consider my normal human mortality. I’m at an age when I think about it more.

As one who jogs regularly and watches cholesterol in the hope of avoiding the heart disease that took my father’s life, I believe in caring for our bodies. But the urgency of our digitally tracked workouts and our high-ticket nutrition supplements take on a zeal with roots in what looks like a determined, desperate effort to avoid the truth that we are creatures of breath and dust and ash. Sometimes we don’t just bump into the realization, we trip over it, get shaken awake by it, collide with it. Writes Frederick Buechner, “It is no longer just in my mind that I know I am rather a good deal closer to the end of my time than I am to its beginning. I know it in my stomach.”

I heard about a lecture by the noted authority on care for the dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She asked the gathering, “How many here are terminally ill? Raise your hands.” A few did, prompting her to say, “My dear ones, we are all terminally ill.”

Rather than depress or dispirit me, however, thinking about my limited life span is a tonic for the soul. Might Easter practices change how we see what the psalmist called our life span as a mere handbreadth?

Awareness of my limited days need not shrink my world. It doesn’t need to make me grasp more or grow anxious over what days remain. Such imagery instead reframes ordinary things: how I spend an afternoon, the patience I extend or withhold with a coworker, the small choices at home that accumulate into a life. I’m staying more awake to weekday signs of goodness bringing life and delight, sometimes hiding in the course of a day’s events.

And with Easter still fresh, I consider the glimmering, glittering possibility that God can take my human frailty and fill it with the fragrance of eternity. Wouldn’t God love to plant within me a more durable delight, however many (or few) birthdays I have left? Easter truths help here. Leave me more alive than ever.

Lately I’ve been struck by what it all might mean for, well, today, even as I write these lines. I think of a couple of sometimes-overlooked passages of Scripture. But the boldness of what they claim now astonishes me, and I’ve been pondering their impact, their import. I can barely take it in. But I can try, and I hope you will also.

I mean a verse like this: “If the Spirit of [God] who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you,” the apostle Paul wrote, “he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies” (Romans 8:11). Paul was saying that the power that erupted in the resurrection of Jesus—that victory over the forces of evil and injustice and death— is moving around, flexing some muscles. Christ is doing something in the world as we know it. The world as we hope it. I guess I could see how it might seem simpler to picture it happening in “religious” settings. But Paul is not content to leave the power at work confined to the “heavenly.”

So again, he drove home the point (in another passage) about God’s incomparably great power for us who believe. God’s power in us and around us, Paul wrote, “is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:19-20). Strength for when we get wearied. For what transpired in the risen Jesus has to do with the everyday, not just the eternal. I forget how daily such a truth can feel. God is working in the big things and little. The massive and seemingly microscopic. And not just in some future eternity, but here and now. In the relationships that seem stuck in distance or stalled in hurt. In the temptations we can’t seem to navigate. Maybe in our work and callings.

When telling my friend Daniel about my work on my new book—the demands, the effort, and the stretching, and particularly the chapter about the resurrected realities of the living Jesus, he reminded me, “That power you are writing about can also move through you and what you write.” It got me wondering about how many of our tasks could be infused with a life beyond our own. A vitality that has to do with an eternity that stretches backward and forward. A power not intimidated by turns and forces that make us cower or grieve or worry.

I heard about a plumber, active in his church, overflowing with God’s life in his own praying, who said as he carried on his trade, “There are some prayerfully laid pipes in this area.” I love that picture of a daily life infused with God’s risen life, a person practicing resurrection!

 And I wonder: What might that same power mean in your daily work? Your uncertainties? Even your heartaches? 

Adapted from my new book, Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes, Nelson Books, 2026.

Where you can find me:

Near Nashville:

Book signing / Meet the Author The Rabbit Room (North Wind Manor), Wednesday, April 15, 1-4pm (link to RSVP here) Come just to hang out at the wondrous North Wind Manor, too!

https://www.rabbitroom.com / 3321 Stephens Hill Ln, Antioch, TN 37013

In New York City:

Breakout session Presenter at Mockingbird’s annual conference, with the theme, “Wow to the Deadness, Wonder for the Weary.” Registration still open! My talk will be “More Than a ‘Like’: When Grace Calls Us Beloved.”

In Nashville:

Preaching at 7:30, 8:45, 11 am services, with book signing at 10:05 am, Sunday, May 3, St. George’s Episcopal Church, 4715 Harding Road 37205.

Preaching at the 9:30 am service, with book signing to follow: Sunday, May 31 at 10:45, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, 4800 Belmont Park Terrace, Nashville, 37215.