These gifts, which are the foundation of eternity, God has given to us and he’s given us complete control over them. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us exactly what they are: faith, hope, and love.

“When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame him and cry out against him for not caring? What’s left to us when that which we love most has been taken? “I will tell you what’s left, three profound blessings.

But after a long moment he seemed to gather himself and went on. “I confess that I have cried out to God, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ ” Here my father paused and I thought he could not continue. My mortal heart this morning is breaking. In dying all was revealed to him, but alive Jesus like us saw with mortal eyes, felt the pain of mortal flesh, and knew the confusion of imperfect mortal understanding. How terrible that must have been and how alone he must have felt. But in that moment of his bitter railing he must have felt betrayed and completely abandoned by his father, a father he’d always believed loved him deeply and absolutely.

I know of no darker moment in the Bible than the moment Jesus in his agony on the cross cries out, ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ Darker even than his death not long after because in death Jesus at last gave himself over fully to the divine will of God. Not the glorious resurrection that we celebrate on Easter Sunday but the darkness that came before. “It isn’t Easter,” he said, “but this week has caused me to think a lot about the Easter story.

Kent krueger ordinary grace