It isn’t lost on me that the most discouraging Sunday in church ministry is often the Sunday after Easter, as auditoriums and parking lots return to normal and as people’s sense of the reality of Christ’s resurrection seems like a distant memory.

Part of this discouragement is because we do measure the wrong things and I know that. We usually measure number of attenders, which is an interesting metric, but not a real guage on the impact that the gospel is having on a group of people. But, part of this discouragement is the nagging sense that we know that if we were all really paying attention to the reality of the resurrection, then every Sunday would feel like Easter Sunday. The fact that it doesn’t just shows what a distracted group of people we are.

I love the thought of a God who is prepared to get His hands dirty, to work in the soil of the world, at a task that others don’t really want to do, in order to preserve and promote beauty and flourishing in the world. What a humble King we have in Jesus, one who could be mistaken for a gardener.

As you prepare for Holy Week, it is helpful to remember how Christ Himself prepared for Gethsemane. I can tend to believe that Jesus went to the cross with curses on His lips and frustration in His heart, but nothing could be further from the truth. Though His anguish was indescribable, and His agony unlike any before or since, what came from His mouth was praise for His Father in the form of a song of faith. A song about what is true of God in the midst of deep suffering. A song still true for us today.