Dear Restful subscribers,

A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you that I have been suffering from an intense new phase of a chronic illness. I’m receiving support from care providers and trying to make decisions one day at a time in terms of what my body needs for care and recovery. In the meantime, I have also been completing the spring semester of seminary and tending to a couple of other commitments. It’s been challenging not knowing from one day to the next what my capacity might be, and many of you have been directly affected by my need to change plans at the last minute. I am especially grateful to those of you I met in spiritual direction, as this has often been where I have needed to postpone or cancel appointments and events. Thanks also to the guests I had invited to join me in a series of livestream conversations here during Eastertide; I appreciate your understanding as I had to cancel the series entirely.

I’m beginning to experience some re…

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Dear Restful subscribers,

I wanted to let you know that I didn’t intend for the Lent & Easter Daybook to end so abruptly last Sunday. I had intended to offer a gentle transition from the daily meditations to the once-or-twice-a-week publishing cadence I’d intended for the Great 50 Days of Eastertide. Unfortunately, I am experiencing a severe flare-up of a chronic illness that has kept me from many of my normal work rhythms. I am getting help from doctors and other care providers, and once I have a better sense of a “new normal,” I will share what I’m thinking for my work here at Restful.

I understand that some of you pay for weekly updates here, and while I hope to return to that soon (including a line-up of livestream conversations I currently have scheduled with excellent guests), I would understand if you need to pause your subscription. If you can hold off on that decision, I will try to provide a clearer update soon. No matter what you decide, please know that Brian and I are deep…

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Welcome back to the Lent & Easter Daybook here at Restful. Thank you for keeping company with me here throughout Lent and now into this week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this week’s simple breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands
Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Welcome back to the Lent & Easter Daybook here at Restful. Thank you for keeping company with me here throughout Lent and now into this week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this week’s simple breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands
Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Welcome back to the Lent & Easter Daybook here at Restful. Thank you for keeping company with me here throughout Lent and now into this week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this week’s simple breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands
Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Welcome back to the Lent & Easter Daybook here at Restful. Thank you for keeping company with me here throughout Lent and now into this week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this week’s simple breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands
Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Welcome back to the Lent & Easter Daybook here at Restful. Thank you for keeping company with me here throughout Lent and now into this week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this week’s simple breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands
Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Welcome back to the Lent & Easter Daybook here at Restful. Thank you for keeping company with me here throughout Lent and now into this week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this week’s simple breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands
Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

John Macleod Campbell Crum

1 Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,

Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;

Love lives again, that with…

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Happy Resurrection Day, friends! Easter Sunday marks the start of a week in the liturgical calendar known as the Easter Octave and a seven-week festival called Eastertide, or The Great Fifty Days.

Let’s begin today’s mediation.

COMMUNION

Joining the Church’s rhythm of word and prayer.

Attend a Resurrection Sunday Service

If you live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, you are most welcome to attend our service at the Church of the Apostles. We will meet in person and online at 10:00 a.m. today.

Read

• Exodus 14:10-14,21-31; Psalm 118:14-17, 22-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18

Pray

Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may, by your life-giving Spirit, be delivered from sin and raised from death; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

CONTEMPLATION

Opening our hearts, minds, and bodies through beauty, listening, and stillness.

Light a candle as you pray this week’s lament as a breath prayer:

Inhale: Into your hands

Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat slowly until you feel ready to begin reading today’s reflection.

Read more

We know that death does not have the last word, but until Jesus comes and calls us from our graves, death tramples our hearts and homes with a vengeance. Today, in our seventh reflection of our Lenten series, Bless the Mourners, encourages us to look to Jesus — rather than our misconceptions of a “good death” — as our example for dying and grieving death.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle as you repeat a breath prayer from Jesus’ last words:

Inhale: Into your hands

Exhale: I commit my spirit.

Repeat slowly until you feel ready to begin reading today’s reflection.

The Seventh Word

This final word from Jesus gives voice to losses that feel meaningless and suffering that lies beyond understanding, naming grief and broken trust that remain unresolved. Writing alongside this word, reflects on Jesus’ how to die well and how that is helping her as she has become intimately acquainted with grief.

I've added some reflection prompts at the end of today’s post to help you think about your own story in light of Jesus’ words. You might consider journaling your thoughts while reading Karen’s reflection or even writing your own. Feel free to share your insights in the comments.

Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

A Reflection by

We know we are all going to die. If we think about it, we may imagine our death scenes as life’s last moments as they appear in movies: gentle music playing, long, lingering looks with our loved ones, beautiful words spoken, and then a final gentle breath that appears painless. In our fantasy, we probably even look great lying down on the bed.

Death is not usually like that, I have discovered in the last few years, as beloveds have passed not peacefully away. I wonder now if the term “died peacefully” is repeated in obituaries over and over again as a final burst of global peer pressure.

We’d love for it to be so, but it may not be.

Jesus’ death on the cross means so much for us theologically, and eternally, of course. It means the world. And it’s also a glimpse at an honest death and a lesson in how to die well.

But before this, Jesus also models how to grieve well. Fourteen chapters – and what feels like a lifetime – before the events of Luke 23 when Jesus dies his torturous death on the cross, we witness his response in Luke 9 to the also-awful death of his cousin and friend, John the Baptist.

I read this story differently now that I’m acquainted with grief. Scripture says the apostles returned with the news of John’s death and share it with Jesus. He had to have been devastated. His beloved cousin, and we can assume, I think, lifelong friend, the one who prepared his way, was beheaded at the whim of Herod’s wife. Jesus and his closest friends “withdrew by themselves” (Luke 9:10), and in a bit more detail in Matthew 14: “When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.” Crowds followed, and scripture says Jesus had compassion on them. What follows is the story of feeding those crowds with the loaves and fish.

Bereaved Jesus had to get away. He withdrew to a solitary place when he heard what had happened. How deeply Jesus must have felt this tragedy, this tender loss of friend and cousin, the death of the man who was the baby that leaped inside his mother’s womb when pregnant Mary came close. How incredibly sad this passage is.

Here is how we, too, can be shaped by grief – not through miracles, but by allowing grief to make us better, not worse, compassionate, not bitter. To be shaped by tragedy toward generosity and concern for others, perhaps, is a minor miracle. That is what we can wish for from our grief – for it not to be wasted but turned into love.

First, Jesus teaches us how to live within the sadness and shock of all that can go wrong in the world. Then he shows us how to die. It’s not pretty, but there is beauty. Jesus caring about his mother and asking his disciple to embrace her as his own; forgiveness extended; the grace-filled promise to the man dying next to him; the raw honesty in the cry of loneliness; and, of course, finally, the commendation of his own spirit into God’s hands.

Our deaths may not be pretty, but into God’s merciful hands our spirits will go.

We are fearfully and wonderfully and physically made. And we are all dying. Jesus breathed his last, and someday so will we, and he knows exactly what that is like. That is a comfort. We know that because of the curtain that tore, and the perfect brave truth the Centurian – and we echo – said in those six words that whisper through history: “Truly, this man was God’s son,” that it was okay in the end, and it will be okay in the end, and it will be okay at our specific and potentially not pretty or peaceful end. That end will be the moment of our truest beginning.

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Karen Stiller is the author of Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life (NavPress, 2024) and The Minister’s Wife (Tyndale House, 2020), and co-author of Craft, Cost & Call: How to Build a Life as a Christian Writer. She is host of the NavPress podcast Good Books, Big Questions and has written for Reader’s Digest, The Walrus, Christianity Today, and other publications. Karen served for 22 years as an editor at Faith Today, holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, is currently pursuing a doctorate in the Sacred Art of Writing, and lives in Ottawa.

Explore her work:

• Find Karen Stiller on Substack: Karen Stiller
• Read her book: Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life

About This Series

This Lent, seven writers will join us to reflect on the Seven Last Words of Jesus from the cross. Each week, one writer will focus on a specific lament and share a personal reflection rooted in their own experience. These writers understand grief, loss, and the slow process of waiting on God for help. They are familiar with suffering that does not resolve quickly or neatly, if at all.

Together with the daily meditations in Lent Daybook, these Saturday reflections encourage us to reclaim the lament we may have overlooked and to remember that mourning is not something we do alone. Together before the face of God, lament becomes the language of blessing those who mourn.

You can read the previous reflections in this series here:

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. by Anna Friedrich

Today, you will be with me in paradise. by Timothy Hoiland

Woman, behold your son! Behold your mother! by Christie Purifoy

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? by Lauren Shea Little

I thirst. by Patricia Paddey

It is finished. by Nancy Nordenson

Six of our Lenten guest writers will join me for live conversations during Eastertide. You'll receive notifications about times and guests as we get closer to each livestream date. Learn more here!

Reflection Prompts to Help You Mourn with Jesus

Spend some quiet moments reflecting on Jesus’ last words by adding your words and stories of mourning and grief. You may want to use a journal or a sketch pad to involve your heart, mind, and body in this exercise. You may even want to invite a friend or small group to listen to your reflections.

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this simple breath prayer:

Inhale: It is,
Exhale: finished.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Even as we begin to dream of Resurrection celebrations, we remain intentional about keeping pace with Jesus and his followers through Holy Week. This is how we can keep watch and pray with our beloved friend and King.

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray the simple breath prayer from this week’s lament:

Inhale: It is
Exhale: finished.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Eastertide is for practicing resurrection!

One of my favorite ways to celebrate the Great 50 Days of Easter is to look for simple, beautiful ways to practice resurrection in my everyday life.

How do I practice resurrection?

The answer, I've learned, is one day, and sometimes, one moment at a time.

I try to be like the infamous, imperceptive disciples walking toward their Emmaus home, asking questions, following Spirit-infused instincts, hovering around life, inviting Life to come home and have dinner at my table. Occasionally, the Spirit of God flutters my almost-dead eyelids, and I get an eyeful of the Firstborn of Creation—our risen Christ—right there with me1—eating and drinking and telling stories of life.

I start with the old things: scripture, church, and prayer. Then, I visit some new things: poems, music, and art. I combine generously with daily generative things: walks, conversations, candles, fresh food, flowers, champagne, neighbors, and gardens.

I also look for ways to take up something new I’ve been dreaming of trying, or to begin again on something I have given up for Lent, or just because of busyness or complacency.

I take N.T. Wright’s counsel to heart:

“... we should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children's games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. this is our greatest festival...This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.

..if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again -- well, of course...”

I’ve learned that practicing lament and resurrection exposes us to benediction in its fullness—blessed are those who mourn, for we are comforted. To help us imagine what this looks like, I’m inviting our Lenten guest writers to join me in conversation about living as mourners comforted by the risen Christ.

In past years, we’ve marked Eastertide—the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost—with a series called Practice Resurrection (after the Wendell Berry poem). This year, I’m excited to try something new: an Eastertide Livestream Series.

Livestream Conversations for Eastertide

Six of our Lenten guest writers are available to join me for live conversations during Eastertide. You'll receive notifications about times and guests as we get closer to each livestream date. We'll gather around one question: Where do you find resurrection life in the midst of your mourning? I've asked each guest to share how the Lord's resurrection meets them in the stories of mourning they've told, and how they practice that resurrection in everyday life, even as grief continues. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what comes up for you as you reflect on this question in your own life.

Easter Daybook Continues!

Paid subscribers will continue to receive a daily meditation for the first 8 days of Eastertide (also known as the Easter Octave). Then, after April 12, we’ll celebrate the season with two weekly posts: one a recorded livestream conversation with one of our Lenten guest writers, and the other a Sunday meditation with art, music, and prayer to accompany the weekly lectionary passages.

Looking for tangible ways to live into this season? Paid subscribers can access 50 Ways to Celebrate the Great 50 Days of Eastertide below! Choose one idea or 50, but whatever you do, do it with gusto!

Can’t wait to practice resurrection together this season, friends!

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this simple breath prayer:

Inhale: It is,
Exhale: finished.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray the simple breath prayer from this week’s lament:

Inhale: It is
Exhale: finished.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray the simple breath prayer from this week’s lament:

Inhale: It is
Exhale: finished.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Let’s begin today’s mediation.

COMMUNION

Joining the Church’s rhythm of word and prayer.

Attend a Palm Sunday Service

If you live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, you are most welcome to attend our service at the Church of the Apostles. We will meet in person and online at 10:00 a.m. today. Our palm service begins outside by the church bell and is not available online until we all process into the sanctuary, but you can read the scripture, prayers, and songs here: Liturgy of the Palms

Read

• Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11; Matthew 26:14 - 27:66

Pray

Almighty and everlasting God, in your tender love for us you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon himself our nature, and to suffer death upon the Cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and come to share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

CONTEMPLATION

Opening our hearts, minds, and bodies through beauty, listening, and stillness.

Light a candle as you pray this week’s lament as a breath prayer:

Inhale: It is

Exhale: finished.

Repeat slowly until you feel ready to begin reading today’s reflection.

LOOK & LISTEN

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle as you repeat a breath prayer from Jesus’ last words:

Inhale: It is

Exhale: finished.

Repeat slowly until you feel ready to begin reading today’s reflection.

The Sixth Word

This word from Jesus speaks an ending into the midst of suffering, one that is not easily named as victory or relief. In her reflection, Nancy Nordenson will write alongside this word, attending to what it means to live with what has been powerfully accomplished and what is still woefully incomplete.

I've added some reflection prompts at the end of today’s post to help you think about your own story in light of Jesus’ words. You might consider journaling your thoughts while reading Nancy’s reflection or even writing your own. Feel free to share your insights in the comments.

It Is Finished

A Reflection by

“Christ, we do all adore thee,” sings the congregation to which I belong as a doxology each Sunday during Lent. Based on a medieval Latin chant from the ninth century, this hymn has only a few lines. Those that catch my attention are these: “For on the holy cross hast thou / the world from sin redeemed.”

When Jesus said, “It is finished,” his penultimate statement before he died, it’s reasonable to conclude he was referring to this divine act of redemption. Yet, even as he was dying, Jesus was fully human while also fully divine. I wonder, then, whether these words may have been more nuanced than a final theological declaration of accomplishment.

When I was in ninth grade, I convinced my brother that he and I should pool our money and buy the album, Jesus Christ Superstar for our father as a Christmas present. The year was 1971, and the album had been high on the charts since its release earlier that January. My father wasn’t particularly interested in it, however, and neither was my brother. I didn’t admit it at the time, but I was the one who had wanted the album.

The rock opera began as a single, “Superstar,” which was released in 1970. With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, the single was followed in 1971 by the full-length album of twenty-three songs that tracked the last seven days of Jesus’s life. Ian Gillian from the band Deep Purple played Jesus, and British actor Murray Head played Judas on that first recording. In October of that year, the live performance opened on Broadway.

I loved that album. In a spiral notebook and using a pen with purple ink, I wrote out the lyrics, often writing with tears I couldn’t quite explain. About twenty-five years ago, I bought the 20th anniversary London cast recording on CD and have listened to it on most Good Fridays ever since. I play “Gethsemane” on repeat. I still get teary.

I’d long wanted to attend a live performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, and this past year I finally did. The week before Christmas, my husband and I went to see the Regent’s Park Theatre London Production at the Ordway in St. Paul, with Jack Hopewell as Jesus. The night was snowy and cold, and traffic had moved slowly on the icy highway as we drove east from Minneapolis, yet the theater was nearly full.

From the minute I saw the show’s logo on the screen, two angels bowing toward each other, I was waiting for “Gethsemane,” the scene set in the Garden of Gethsemane just prior to the arrest of Jesus. It did not disappoint. Hopewell as Jesus took center stage, dressed in a white t-shirt and white pants. He sang into a microphone set on a stand while playing his guitar. In a gentle voice, he asked whether there was a way that the cup he was facing might be taken from him. He wasn’t sure any more about this plan of death, he admitted. Drums came in and punctuated this admission. He was tired. He was sad. The three years he’d been preaching and teaching and healing now felt like thirty.

The intensity of the scene grew. On-stage Jesus wanted to know, and he wanted God to answer him: Why should he die? If he died, would all that he’d done somehow matter more? He wanted answers. Again and again, he questioned and pleaded. The audience was so quiet, so still, as if we weren’t sure what metaphysical reality might be interrupted should we with a whisper or a sneeze interfere with this conversation between him and God.

The intensity escalated. He stopped playing his guitar and held the microphone with both hands. Outside the theater snow continued to fall, and workers in the lobby stood at their stations. Then this sad and tired, this desperate, man-god screamed out “Why?” in what I’ve read is a vocal note that is notoriously difficult to hit, and few singers do, Hopewell being one of them. Show me, my God, show me the reason to die, he pleaded.

The fully human side of Jesus was here on full display, which we so often forget about as we traditionally focus on all the ways he showed his divinity—changing water into wine, healing the lame and the blind, feeding the five thousand with a couple fish and several loaves of bread, raising people from the dead.

With anger and fear building in his voice, on-stage Jesus relented. Watch me die! he taunted in yet another scream. He unplugged his guitar, laying it down, then grabbed the microphone and threw its stand across the stage. Luke, the physician, wrote in his gospel that Jesus was so troubled while praying at Gethsemane that he sweat blood, which may not have been hyperbole but an actual phenomenon, as described in a 1986 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He fell then to his knees and dropped his head to the ground.

All was silent.

Quietly, the piano started again. He raised his head and sat back on his heels. The disciples who waited for real Jesus may have been sleeping as he prayed, but in this auditorium, the audience was wide awake, watching each movement, listening for every word. He began again to sing, this time pianissimo, and as if through tears. Grief and resignation filled every word. The three years now felt like ninety. The cup, he would drink.

In that theater, I was again a fourteen-year-old girl, my face wet with tears.

Why am I scared to finish? sang on-stage Jesus in the garden.

“It is finished,” said Jesus on the cross.

When the songs were over, the actors had bowed, and the curtain came down, lights glittered from bare trees in the park across the street from the theater, and the new snow sparkled. The people, witnesses to the Passion and crucifixion, walked away to their cars, buses, taxis, and left their tracks in the snow. In the days ahead, there would be the baking and eating of holiday food, wrapping and exchanging of gifts, and singing of carols and hymns that celebrate the birth of the one who just moments ago was weeping in the garden. We didn’t know it then, but within a couple weeks these Twin Cities would be filled with armed federal agents whose eyes scanned for the least of us and who gathered up so many of all of us in the chaos and violence, leaving us with more to mourn than we ever imagined. Like Jesus, I’m living in the tension of holding fast to that which I love in the face of so much that needs to be redeemed.

“Christ, we do all adore thee,” we sing Sunday after Sunday in these weeks leading to Easter. Jesus drank the cup of his suffering and death, which three of the four gospels tell us he resisted, and went to the cross. We can’t know if he was grieving or full of fear as he went, but I imagine that he may have been both. Then, it was finished. His human life. His divine redeeming act. The medieval doxology continues, “And we do praise thee forever.”

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Nancy Nordenson is the author of Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure (Kalos Press) and Just Think: Nourish Your Mind to Feed Your Soul (Baker). She is currently at work on a book of essays on the topic of hope in everyday life. Her writing has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Indiana Review, Comment, and other publications and anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman (University of Nebraska Gender Studies) and The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Cascade). In addition, a number of her essays have earned "notable" recognition in the Best American Essays and Best Spiritual Writing anthologies as well as Pushcart Prize nominations. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University and lives in Minneapolis with her husband.

Explore her work:

• Nancy Nordenson on Substack:

• Her book: Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure

About This Series

This Lent, seven writers will join us to reflect on the Seven Last Words of Jesus from the cross. Each week, one writer will focus on a specific lament and share a personal reflection rooted in their own experience. These writers understand grief, loss, and the slow process of waiting on God for help. They are familiar with suffering that does not resolve quickly or neatly, if at all.

Together with the daily meditations in Lent Daybook, these Saturday reflections encourage us to reclaim the lament we may have overlooked and to remember that mourning is not something we do alone. Together before the face of God, lament becomes the language of blessing those who mourn.

You can read the previous reflections in this series here:

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. by Anna Friedrich

Today, you will be with me in paradise. by Timothy Hoiland

Woman, behold your son! Behold your mother! by Christie Purifoy

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? by Lauren Shea Little

I thirst. by Patricia Paddey

Reflection Prompts to Help You Mourn with Jesus

Spend some quiet moments reflecting on Jesus’s last words by adding your words and stories of mourning and grief. You may want to use a journal or a sketch pad to involve your heart, mind, and body in this exercise. You may even want to invite a friend or small group to listen to your reflections.

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this simple breath prayer:

Inhale: I,
Exhale: thirst.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more

Let’s Begin

Light a candle and pray this simple breath prayer:

Inhale: I,
Exhale: thirst.

Repeat this slowly until you feel ready to continue.

Read more