After Easter

Along the Way

Something happens after Easter that I don’t think we talk about enough.

The season has its own natural crescendo. It starts with all that Lenten quiet, then the weight of Holy Week, the strange suspended feeling of Holy Saturday and finally Easter arrives with all its alleluias.

And then the next morning comes. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The decorations are still up but the feeling has already begun to fade.

I usually feel a little disoriented in that space. A little let down, if I’m honest. Not disappointed exactly. More like I was expecting something to have landed. Maybe sense some shift I could name and point to. But instead, I’m just here. The next day came. And here we are. Still walking.

If you feel that too, I want you to know: I think that’s a real thing, not a failure of faith.

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Something I read this week has been sitting with me.

In Isaiah 50, the servant says, I have set my face like flint. It’s a powerful image if you stop and look at it. Steady. Fixed. Resolved toward something that hasn’t fully arrived yet.

And then I remembered that Jesus does something very similar. Luke says he “resolutely set his face toward Jerusalem.“ He knows where the road leads. He knows what’s coming. And still, he turns his face toward it and begins to walk.

No speeches. No visible struggle ... not yet.

Just a quiet, settled yes.

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I’ve often imagined faith as intensity. Big moments. Clear decisions. Certainty you can name and point to.

But more and more, it feels like something else. Quieter. Less like a dramatic decision and more like a direction you keep choosing, usually without much fanfare. The road after Easter looks a lot like the road before it. Same questions. Same ordinary days.

And yet something has shifted. Not out there exactly, but underneath. A deeper knowing that we are not walking alone. A trust, fragile some days and steadier on others, that even on this road we are held.

That’s not a very triumphant thing to say on the other side of Easter. But I think it might be true.

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I find I still want clarity. I want to know where this is going. I want some reassurance that the path I’m on is the right one. If I’m honest, I want a map with just enough detail to keep me from feeling lost. I don’t want to want that, but I do.

I’ve been trying to sit with that want instead of fixing it. Just noticing how persistent it is. How even now, well into this particular stretch of the journey, I still reach for certainty like a light switch in a dark room. Automatic. Sometimes even a little desperate.

What I’m given instead is both simpler and harder.

A direction. One step. The invitation to keep going without knowing more than that.

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I have set my face like flint.

The road I walk is nothing like the one Jesus faced. But still, I feel an invitation in that right now. Not a hardening, and not a shutting down of the questions or the wanting. More like a posture. A quiet yes to the road in front of me. A willingness to keep showing up even on the days when showing up is the only thing I can honestly say I’ve done.

The road is still the road. The questions are still the questions. But something in me is turned toward it.

That might be enough for today.

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We’re back to the weekly rhythm of Wick & Whisper now, after the Lent break, and that feels like the right place to land this post.

If you’re new here, or if you’ve been around a while and want a fresh sense of what this space is trying to be, I wrote something on Holy Saturday that might serve as a kind of orientation or reorientation. You can find it here.

The short version: I’m not trying to fix anything or lead anyone somewhere tidy. I just want this to be a quiet place where the pace is different, where the shalom of God is taken seriously, and where it’s okay to arrive either excited or a little worn.

Glad to be walking with you again.