What the Warm Morning Is

The warm morning is not only the Memorial Day morning in Central Florida.

It is the morning of the first day of the week when the women arrived at the tomb with their spices and found the stone moved and the linen cloths lying there and no body. That morning was warm too — the spring morning in Jerusalem, the sun coming up over the Mount of Olives, the city still asleep around the grief the disciples were carrying. The warmth of that morning was ordinary. What was not ordinary was what had happened inside the cold stone of the tomb while the warmth was building.

The warm morning is the name for every morning on the other side of Saturday. Every morning that exists after the descent and the conquest and the confirmation. Every morning in which the one who holds the keys is alive, in which the relational knowing of John 17:3 is available to the soul in poverty of spirit, in which the empty hands are the right hands and the narrow knife-edge of the present moment is the place where the eternal present is accessible.

This morning is a warm morning. Not because the theology has been resolved or the grief has been answered or the questions have all been closed. The widow still has a stone to stand in front of. The man still has a relationship that ended without the conversation he needed to have. The old man still has the arithmetic of remaining years doing what it does. The warmth is not the absence of those things. The warmth is what is present alongside them — the map that matches the territory, the path that is genuinely open, the one who went to the bottom of Sheol and came back out on Sunday morning and is alive forevermore and holds the keys.