The Day In Between
Learning to stay in the quiet places where nothing seems to be happening
There’s a kind of day we don’t talk about very much.
It’s not the day everything falls apart.
And it’s not the day when everything comes back together.
It’s the day in between.
The day where what you hoped for seems to have gone, but nothing new has come to take its place. The day where you wake up and everything feels heavy. Still unresolved. Still not what you thought it would be.
It’s a quiet kind of hard.
We tend to tell our stories in beginnings and endings. Before and after. Problem and solution.
But that’s not actually where we live most of our lives.
Most of life happens in the middle.
In the waiting.
In the not knowing.
In the slow stretch of time when nothing seems to be changing, even though it feels like it should be.
In the Easter story, we often move quickly from the cross to the resurrection. From Friday straight to Sunday. From loss to hope.
But there was a Saturday.
A whole day where nothing seemed to happen.
Jesus had been killed. The one they had followed, trusted, built their lives around was gone. His body was placed in a tomb, and the stone was rolled into place.
And that was it.
No miracle.
No explanation.
No sense of what might come next.
Just silence.
I often wonder what that day must have felt like for the people who loved him.
The confusion of it.
The sharp disappointment.
The questions that must have circled in their minds.
We thought he was the one.
We thought things would be different.
We didn’t think it would turn out like this.
And now… nothing.
The thing about that Saturday is that they didn’t know Sunday was coming.
We do, of course. We read it as a story of hope, of life breaking through, of things being made new.
But they didn’t have that perspective.
They were just in it.
And even when Sunday did come, not everyone recognised it straight away. There’s that moment on the Road to Emmaus where two of the disciples are walking along, talking about everything that has happened, trying to make sense of it.
And Jesus comes alongside them.
Alive. Present. Walking with them.
And they don’t recognise him. Not at first.
Which, if I’m honest, feels strangely comforting.
Because it suggests that even when something has shifted, even when hope is closer than we think, it doesn’t always feel like it. It doesn’t always arrive in a way we can immediately name or understand.
Sometimes we are still processing Saturday, even as Sunday begins.
I’ve had a bit of that recently.
Weeks of emails and phone calls and meetings, trying to sort out CHC funding for my mum. Sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open, refreshing my inbox more times than I’d like to admit. A cup of coffee beside me going cold as I get distracted and forget to drink it.
Advocating. Chasing. Trying to hold things together for Mum while everything still felt uncertain.
Trying to trust a process that didn’t always feel very trustworthy.
I didn’t know how it would land. I didn’t know if the help we needed would actually arrive.
And then, suddenly, an email.
A yes.
I remember opening it and reading it twice, just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood.
It was a quiet moment. And something inside began to loosen.
There was a plan to move forward. Care would be in place.
Relief, more than anything.
It wasn’t dramatic. Not a big emotional moment. Just a slow exhale. My shoulders dropping a little. The sense that something I had been holding so tightly could finally be set down.
If I’m honest, it felt a bit like stepping into Sunday.
But what’s stayed with me isn’t just the relief.
It’s how real that Saturday felt while I was in it.
How long it felt.
How uncertain it was.
How tiring.
How easy it would have been to believe that nothing at all was happening.
And maybe that’s the hardest part of these in-between spaces.
It looks like nothing.
But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
Holy Saturday, in the Christian story, is a day with no visible movement. No miracles. No answers. No sense of God doing anything at all.
And yet it sits right in the middle of a story that changes everything.
Which makes me wonder whether some of the most important things happen in places that don’t look like much from the outside.
In the waiting.
In the endurance.
In the quiet decision to keep showing up.
Answer the email.
Make the call.
Sit with what is hard.
Rest when you can.
Try again tomorrow.
It doesn’t feel like much.
But sometimes that’s what faith looks like.
Not certainty.
Not clarity.
Just staying.
So if today feels a little bit like Saturday for you, you’re not alone in that.
Not all quiet is absence.
Sometimes what feels like nothing is actually the space where something is quietly, faithfully unfolding.