The Silence of Friday

There is a day between the cross and the empty tomb. Most of us live there.

You know this day.

Not just as a date on the liturgical calendar. You know it the way the body knows it. The way the room gets quiet after something irreversible happens. The way you keep moving — because what else is there to do — while something inside you has gone completely still.

Good Friday is the day everything stopped.

The disciples did not know Sunday was coming. That is the part we forget every year because we already know how the story ends. We read it backwards. We sit in the darkness of Friday with Easter already in our pocket, which means we never really sit in the darkness of Friday at all.

But some of you know what it is to wait without knowing the ending.

Some of you are in a Friday right now. Not a liturgical one. A real one. The kind where something you believed in — a relationship, a dream, a version of yourself, a prayer you prayed for years — has gone quiet. And you are sitting in the aftermath, not sure what comes next, not sure anything comes next.

This post is not going to tell you Sunday is coming.

You already know that. And knowing it doesn't always make Friday easier to survive.

What this post will say is this: Friday is not a mistake in the story. It is part of the story. The waiting is not evidence that something went wrong. It is the space where everything that is being made new has not yet arrived.

You are allowed to sit in that space.

You are allowed to not be okay today.

You are allowed to say — out loud, or just to yourself — this is hard, and I don't know what comes next, and I am still here.

That is not a failure of faith.

That might be the most honest form of it.

If something here stayed with you, the Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. You can find it at direction-series-bible-study.squarespace.com.

The porchlight is on. 🔆

© 2025 Wylette P. Tillman | Polaris Press LLC