A Somber Saturday

As anyone in the greater Raleigh, NC area knows, it’s pretty cold and rainy today.  Some might even say gloomy.  I didn’t even realize this until I left the house this afternoon in search of the perfect soy chai latte.  Well, I found it and, as I sipped it, I could not stop thinking about Jesus’ followers back in the day; and I tried to imagine what I would have felt like the day after I saw the man whom I had put all of my trust and belief and faith in publicly bullied and tortured and murdered.  It’s so easy to forget that Jesus’ inner circle, or (in the spirit of the commercialized Easter season) his “peeps,” were real.  John and James and Peter and their “brothers” were not characters, at least not in the fictionalized sense.  They were flesh and blood men who chose to walk away from everything they had ever known to follow this “new” man called Jesus wherever he went.  And then, just like that, Jesus was gone.  I imagine that they felt as if the sweetest dream they had ever dared to dream had turned into the very worst nightmare they could ever have fathomed.  Jesus had died and he had done so with neither speed nor dignity.  I don’t know why it has taken me so many years in my own Christ walk to allow myself to think about Jesus’ disciples in this way.  But that is the compelling that I woke up with this morning.  It is indeed a most somber day.