When Hard Gets Harder and Dark Gets Darker

How Good Friday Teaches Us to Lament While Never Losing Heart

Anne Lamott offers an insight that every awakened believer can identify with: "Christians are Easter people living in a Good Friday world."

Here, Lamott captures the jarring tension between the promise of future resurrection and the reality of present-day pain. But today, we do not rush ahead to Easter. We do well to remain fully present in Good Friday—letting ourselves feel its sorrow, its loss, and the aching distance of hope.

Good Friday is a day of pain, of endings, of disillusionment.

It is the day when Jesus, who healed the sick, welcomed the outcasts, and proclaimed God’s kingdom, was executed in a humiliating, violent display of aggression and power. It is the day when His followers, who had dared to hope in Him, saw that hope collapse.

The words “It is finished” (a single word in the Greek - tetelesthai) did not yet carry the weight of triumph but instead rang with grief and finality.

This is where we live.

Redemption is not yet fully realized. The world still bears the wounds of Good Friday. Death and loss are ever-present. Betrayal and lament are real. Injustice often goes unchecked. We pray for healing, and sometimes it does not come. Good Friday is not just a moment in history—it is the backdrop of the world we navigate each and every day.

GOOD FRIDAY TEACHING ON VIDEO
NOTE: Video content is unique. It is not a replica of, but a companion to, this essay.

The Weight of Good Friday in Our Lives

We know this world intimately. We see it in war and oppression, in personal loss, in the sting of rejection and distant marriages and fracturing communities and loneliness. We feel it in the silence that follows desperate prayers, in the ache of waiting for restoration that has not yet arrived. The pain of this world is undeniable. It is tempting to try to escape it—to move quickly toward optimism, resolution, or distraction. To numb ourselves. But Good Friday calls us to stay put. It invites us to bear witness to the hard and unholy things, to name them honestly, and to resist the urge to minimize them.

Jesus Himself did not turn away from grief, but became intimately acquainted with it.

He did not offer shallow reassurances to those in mourning. He did not brush past agony with easy answers. Instead, He entered fully into the depths of human hurt. He wept. He grieved. From the cross, He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

His words echo in the hearts of those who have genuinely suffered, reminding us that lament is not a failure of faith—it is a faithful response to pain. Jesus does not rush past Good Friday. He abides in it with us.

Finding Meaning in the Darkness

How do we live in a Good Friday world without leaning on false comforts? Viktor Frankl, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, observed that those who endured unimaginable suffering often found resilience through a disciplined awareness of meaning. He wrote, “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear almost any 'how.'” His insight resonates, but it must also be embodied in real life.

A striking example comes from Dr. Edith Eger, another Holocaust survivor who later, like Frankl, became a psychologist specializing in trauma recovery. She speaks of how suffering, while excruciating, can be faced with courage when we refuse to let it define us. In her own words:

"I can't change what happened to me, but I can choose how I live now."

"We don’t forget, we don’t overcome, and we don’t move on. We move forward."

For the likes of Viktor Frankl and Edith Eger, survival is not just about escaping suffering but confronting it honestly, allowing it to shape us, and ultimately finding meaning within it. The secret lies in never pretending that suffering is easy or that healing is going to be quick.

The secret is in bearing witness to pain while refusing to let it have the final word.

This is where we find ourselves today, on Good Friday—not in easy answers, not in resolution, but in being honest about the stark reality of suffering. We acknowledge the weight of the world's sorrow without trying to explain it away. We allow ourselves to grieve, to lament, to name the darkness for what it is. And yet, even here, we search for meaning—not by dismissing pain, but by engaging it with honesty and courage. Why? Because we know something:

"We know (!) that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).

Living in the Tension

To live in a Good Friday world is to resist the urge to fix what we in ourselves do not have the power to fix. It is to sit with sorrow instead of rushing toward solutions. It is to stand beside those who suffer, without offering trite reassurances. It is to name injustice without pretending it has already been undone.

Good Friday does not ask us to manufacture hope prematurely. It does not ask us to diminish grief or to move past pain before we are ready. It asks us to stay. To watch. To weep. To bear witness to the pain, the sorrow, and the hurt that is both around us and within us.

It asks us to sit in the silence between pain and redemption, recognizing that much of life is lived in this very space. It asks us to remember that all 66 books of the Bible were written by a person who, at the time of writing, was carrying some form of weakness, insult, hardship, persecution, or difficulty. It asks us to remember that even Jesus, before He received His crown, was crucified, dead, and buried.

If you feel the weight of Good Friday pressing in around you, know this: you are not alone. You never have been.

The sorrow is real. The pain is heavy. The night feels long. And for today, we do not need to rush ahead. We do not need to solve what is unsolvable. We only need to remain here, in the tension, in the grief, in the waiting. For it is those who wait on the Lord that will, in due time, renew their strength (Isaiah 40:31).