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Brittany L. Bergman

Savoring motherhood, building marriage, and living simply

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The Death and Resurrection of Faith: Reflections on Good Friday

Mar 30 Leave a Comment

A year ago on Good Friday, I admitted something out loud that I’d known for some time: my faith, at least as I knew it, was dead.

I made my admission to a trusted friend, telling her that if being a good Christian meant rigid exclusivity and self-righteous certainty, I no longer wanted to be a part of the faith. But I had also followed Jesus long enough at this point to know that he was the only thing I wanted, the only one I desired to follow. The words of Peter rang true for me: Who else would I go to, Lord? (John 6:68).

I was determined to find a new way to live out Jesus’ love, and I couldn’t find that new way without asking some big questions — the ones that had been weighing me down for years, the ones I thought I wasn’t allowed to ask. My friend validated the disillusionment I felt and shared this powerful truth with me: my faith would be false and weak if I wasn’t willing to ask my questions and wrestle honestly with the pieces that didn’t seem to fit.

As I sat in Good Friday service that night, the darkness created a feeling of secrecy. As I listened to the story I’d heard so many times before — Jesus arrested, Jesus beaten, Jesus crucified for my sin — tears began to trickle down my face.

God, why did the violence of crucifixion have to be part of your redemption plan? What is salvation and what is heaven? If you are the very embodiment of love, then why does Christianity feel so exclusive? And why do I see such vitriol and bigotry from some of the people who follow you? Lord, sometimes your Good News doesn’t feel like good news, and what am I supposed to do with that?

After pouring out these questions and many more to God, I asked a few of myself, too: What if I look for the answers and don’t like what I find? What if I’m left with nothing after this? And finally, What now?

I have to imagine that Mary had a lot of questions for God as she watched her son being beaten, nailed to a wooden cross, and finally stabbed to ensure he was really dead. At several points in Jesus’ life, we see Mary contemplating the mystery of God demonstrated in her son. Just after Jesus’ birth, when the shepherds were hooting and hollering and celebrating the Messiah’s arrival, we read that Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart (Luke 2:19). When Jesus was 12 years old, he went missing for three days during a trip to Jerusalem. Mary finally found him in the Temple among the religious leaders, listening and learning and asking questions, and again she treasured all these things in her heart (Luke 2:51).

I imagine that Mary’s pondering in those moments was marked by awe, wonder, hope: This child must really be the Son of God! What mighty things will the Lord accomplish through him? But what did she ponder as she watched him die? I wonder if this time her thoughts and questions were marked by anger, disbelief and grief: God said my son would be King forever, but now he’s been crucified as a common criminal. He is broken! Dead! Gone! Did Jesus do something wrong? Did I do something wrong? Did I misunderstand the promise? Was this whole thing just a sham? God, how could you let this happen?

In the face of death, it’s natural to ask questions and feel a deep longing for some sense of meaning amidst the grief. Good Friday — by all appearances a dead end — invites our bewildered questions. The question that I would guess rang through the minds of Mary and the disciples, the one that rang most true for me a year ago was, Where do I go from here?

On that first Good Friday, Mary and the disciples couldn’t have known that Sunday — the Resurrection —  was coming. But somewhere deep in the human soul, there is an innate knowledge that death doesn’t have the final word, and I like to think Mary felt that tiny flicker of hope. It’s a key theme of fairy tales and epic fantasies, of Hollywood blockbusters and ad-libbed bedtime stories. And it’s the story God has been telling throughout history: Death is not the end. There is always another way.

It’s this heart-level belief that has guided me over the past year. I’ve been exploring my questions through listening to pastors, podcasts, scholars, trusted friends and the Bible itself; I’ve been honest with God and with myself; I’ve learned so much about Christian history and faith practices and various theories about nitty-gritty theological questions.

After a year of searching, the unsatisfying ending to my story is this: I still don’t have the answers to my questions. But these various voices have helped me to see that the life of faith is forged in the wrestling, in the searching, in the waiting. A butterfly has to beat its wings against the inside of the cocoon to gain the strength to fly; it has to struggle to free itself in order to experience true freedom. And so I keep beating my wings in the darkness, just as Mary and the disciples and so many believers before me have had to do.

Besides, if God’s story is true — if there really are no dead ends in faith, if resurrection is always right around the corner — then this is not the end of my story at all, but the middle, the perfect spot for God to open up a new pathway.


This piece was originally posted over at The MOPS Blog, a site I love and contribute to regularly.

Photo by Aaron Brunhofer on Unsplash.

P.S. What if all God wants is for us to hold out our empty, dusty hands?

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Filed Under: Faith Tagged With: doubt, faith, freedom, God, good friday, Jesus, mary

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brittanylbergman

Brittany L. Bergman
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It’s a great day to witness the shattering of a glass ceiling, to embrace empathy and decency, and to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The work is only just beginning, but today, we celebrate. Congratulations, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris! 👏🏼🎉💙
What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaki What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaking, cozy, chaotic-but-strangely-quiet Christmas we had. ✨🎄✨

That’s a wrap for me on 2020—I’ll be off social media until sometime in January. May you be filled with peace and hope as we close this year but still wait for the close of this chapter in our history. 💜
I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; d I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; depression and rage; exhaustion and loneliness. But I can honestly say this is the weariest Christmas I can remember. I say that not to shine a spotlight on me, but to say that I have a feeling this might be your experience too. I’m with you.
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And so the words to my favorite Christmas hymn hit me different this year. They resonate in a place much deeper, more tender and true than ever before. I rejoice in the giggles of my meltdown-prone child. I rejoice in stolen moments alone in the dark, the room lit only by the glow of the Christmas tree. I rejoice in every video and every social media post I see of a frontline worker receiving the COVID vaccine, our ticket out of this nightmare. I rejoice in the vision that next Christmas might look more familiar than this one does. I rejoice in the hope of Christ, whose universal, creative, motherly love holds the whole universe together.
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On this Christmas Eve, I’ll leave you with this quote from Howard Thurman. I hope these words bring a slant of light to your day.
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“The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.”
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Whatever and however you celebrate at this time of year, I’m sending you all my love and peace. 💫
I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in the nick of time.

I baked cookies with Selah without getting frustrated (first time ever?), took the kids on drive to see Christmas lights, and wrapped a bunch of gifts.

But here’s what I think did the trick, and please do steal this idea (because I stole it from someone else but have no idea who): Magical Movie Night™️.

On Saturday night, I stealthily placed a golden ticket under Selah’s pillow (which I printed from the internets and colored quickly with a yellow marker; good enough is good enough for Magical Movie Night!). We put Eamon to bed and got Selah ready for bed too, going through all the normal motions of brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, picking out a book. When we climbed into bed, I told her to look under her pillow.

She was confused when she found the ticket, and I told her it was for a Christmas movie night. “When?” she asked. “Right now!” I said. “What do you mean ‘right now’?” When it dawned on her that she was going to stay up past her bedtime to have a special movie night with Mommy and Daddy (sans Eamon), she lost her mind with excitement.

Bonus: Gramma was waiting downstairs with a bag of popcorn and Swedish Fish!

We snuggled under blankets, turned on Elf, and laughed our festive butts off. (This was her first time watching Elf, and it felt like the dawning of a new era. It’s such a big kid movie! And she loved it! Hold me. 😭)

Deck the halls, bring on Christmas, fill my mug with holly jolly goodness. 

I also acknowledge this has been a crappy year in so many ways, and I know many of you are not going to be able to access Christmas cheer this year. That’s okay. The real spirit of Christmas is light breaking through the dark, love making a way, and the beauty that can’t help seeping through the dirty, messy, horribly human moments of our lives. So you’re covered.

(And if you want to fake it ’til you make it, give Magical Movie Night a try. It’s the actual easiest.)
In which I couldn’t come up with a clever captio In which I couldn’t come up with a clever caption. There are signs of life but my brain is dead. 💀
“This is what I find most mystifying about Adven “This is what I find most mystifying about Advent: the period of waiting ultimately ends in great joy, but we can’t get to that great joy without intense, active, unbearable pain. In Advent we sense the mingling of anticipation and anxiety, excitement and disappointment, joy and pain, hope and fear.
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“On this side of history, we have the luxury of waiting with great hope, great joy, and great expectation. We know Jesus will be born, we know he will save us and redeem us, we know he will die and rise again, and we know he will set all things right one day.
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“But before Christ came, Advent was dark. It was lonely and unknown, as the Israelites waited in faith to hear from God, and all they got was… nothing. Silence.
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“Isn’t this more characteristic of the waiting we usually do? The waiting seasons of our lives are less often marked by joy and hope and more often marked by pain and fear. They are not often cozy or comforting but difficult and dark and even laborious.
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“We wait as a pregnant mother waits for her child to be born—there’s a vision of the joy to come, to be sure, but in the throes of gut-wrenching labor pains, we think we might actually die before we see that joy fulfilled. After a long season of pregnancy, when the fullness of time has arrived, the advent of labor ushers in the real period of waiting—and it is active and painful and raw.”
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// From “In the Fullness of Time,” a new blog post on @first15. There’s a link in my bio to the whole piece, with thoughts on pregnancy, Advent, and waiting well in an exceptionally hard year. 💜 Thank you so much to @first15 for publishing this post!
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Brittany L Bergman is a for-profit blog. Any company that I collaborate with is chosen by me and fits the theme and readership of my blog. At times, posts may contain affiliate links or sponsored content, which is never at any charge to you.

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