Holy Week - Journey to the Ultimate Overcomer: Holy Saturday

By Shelsea Becker

Holy Saturday - Black - Silence & Waiting

“The women rested according to the commandment.” That one line in Luke stopped me. I mean really stopped me. When I read it, I felt like I held my breath. Rested? That’s not what I expected. Not after everything they had just witnessed. Not after the cross. Not after the loss, the confusion, the grief. I would have thought they’d be doing something—anything—to cope. Because if we’re honest, that’s what we tend to do, especially as women. When we grieve, we move. We stay busy. We fix. We distract. We do anything except sit still, because the moment we sit still, we begin to feel. And feeling can be uncomfortable. But what if this is exactly what we need? To sit. To rest. To allow the feelings to surface so that the Creator, who formed you, who knows you, can begin to heal you.

Jesus didn’t just go to the cross for our sins. He went to bring us life. Abundant life. And I believe that includes healing on this side of heaven. Not just someday, but here. Now. Heaven touching earth in the middle of our real lives. When I think of the color black, I used to think of absence; absence of light, absence of color. I think of pits, of depression, of that heavy feeling like a cloud that just follows you around. But what if we began to see it differently? What if black could represent rest? Stillness. Silence. Waiting. Those aren’t places we naturally associate with peace, but what if they are actually invitations?

I’ve been on a journey of learning what it really means to rest, and it hasn’t come naturally. First, God took me to a place of learning to rest in my body, to quiet my mind, to sit with Him in what I call my “Linger Lounge.” Just being with Him without striving, without rushing. Then He began to teach me how to rest even while the world around me felt loud and chaotic. During COVID, I remember Him saying to me, “Look at nature. Is nature in a panic?” And it wasn’t. The trees weren’t rushing. The birds weren’t striving. Creation was steady. And He said, “Then neither should you be.” That moment shifted something in me. Now I’m learning to rest even in my work, and I know that sounds strange—rest and work in the same sentence—but it’s real. When I know He has ordered my steps, when I trust that He is the one directing my path, then I don’t have to carry the pressure of time the way I used to. I can’t keep saying I don’t have enough time, because that kind of thinking produces panic and pressure. And if He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, then He is also the one who holds time. He can stretch it. Redeem it. Even stop it if He chooses. So if I feel like I’m running out of time, I have to go back and ask, “Lord, what am I doing that You didn’t ask me to do?”

And then I think about the breastpiece worn by the high priest. Traditionally, the tribe of Joseph is associated with the onyx stone. And that makes me pause, because Joseph knew what it meant to be in dark places. A pit. A prison. Places that felt silent, forgotten, hidden. Black spaces. And yet those very places became the pathway to the palace. It wasn’t wasted. It wasn’t the end of his story. And it’s not lost on me that it was the interpretation of a dream that finally brought him out. A dream. And when do dreams happen? In rest. In sleep. In stillness.

I wonder how many of us are so busy trying to survive that we’ve forgotten how to rest. And because we don’t rest, we don’t dream. And because we don’t dream, we don’t see what God is trying to show us.

Maybe Holy Saturday isn’t just about waiting.

Maybe it’s about trusting.

Maybe it’s about learning to sit in the quiet, in the unknown, in the space between what was and what is coming… and allowing God to meet us there.

Because resurrection is coming.

But first… we rest.

🖤, Shelsea

Scripture References:

Luke 23:56

John 10:10

Genesis 37 - 41

Psalm 46:10

Psalm 127:2