Good Friday is for many of us a day when we ask why; why was the cross necessary?  And with this question can come doubts.

“If you don’t have doubts, you’re either kidding yourself or asleep.  Doubts are the anti-in-the-pants of faith.  They keep it alive and moving.”  (Frederick Buechner)  When doubts arise in our faith journey, it forces us to choose, and embrace the mystery.

For there is a certainty to the mystery.  “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!  “For who has known the mind of the Lord?  Or who has been his counselor?”” (Romans 11:33-34)

God’s desire to be near us has bridged the gap between holiness and humanity.  From Michele Cushatt’s book, “Relentless” – “When we see the whole story and not just a small slice of it, we can see how the severity of God’s righteous wrath serves to make the severity of His relentless nearness more profound.  Just as light is appreciated only by those who know the dark, it is the justice of his extreme anger that makes His extreme grace so compelling.  Only the most radical, extravagant, unquenchable love would cross such a distance to reach us.”

 Heavenly Father – You have made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. You also planted eternity, a sense of divine purpose, in the human heart; a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except You.  Yet man cannot comprehend or grasp what You have done from the beginning to the end.  Help me embrace the certainty of your mystery.  Amen.  (Based on Ecclesiastes 3:11 AMP)