Hope Is On The Way: How God Reveals a Wellspring of Help on Easter Saturday

By Pam Ellinger-Dixon

Do you feel overwhelmed by pain? Has your heart been shattered? Afraid you may never recover? Do you think your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling?

Then you need a balm for your heartache, a roadmap to a better place and waves of encouragement to keep going. But most of all, you need the renewal of hope of the possibilities and reconne

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ryan Michael Inc.
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986277011

Pam Ellinger-Dixon

Pam Ellinger-Dixon has a M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology, has counseled clients for 30 plus years, is a frequent workshop leader, and Board Chairperson of a counseling and trauma resource center, CitiLookout. Dr. Pam has led hundreds of people through the darkest valleys, assisting them in creating a new life. With wisdom, kindness, and humor she understands the dynamics and necessities of recovery and offers practical and in-depth guidance. When healing seems impossible, Dr. Pam has been there to assist those impacted by traumas from the terrorist attacks in NYC to gunshot victims, from natural disasters to deep betrayals and deaths of loved ones. She teaches extensively on mental health topics and is a consultant to businesses and ministry leaders at the local and state levels. Dr. Pam and her husband live in Ohio and have one adult son and two sweet cocker spaniels. She is an avid hiker, an occasional kayaker, and a regular in the hammock under the trees at home.

Book preview

Preface

IN YOUR DARKEST place, God has not left you alone. You may feel separated from God. Your friends and family may be unaware of your pain, or perhaps they’re unconcerned for you. Maybe you feel forsaken, forgotten, or unimportant. I am here to say God weeps with you and is present in the darkest of dark places of heartache. He cares for you whether you feel it or not. How can I be so certain of this? After all, I don’t know your trauma or the extent of your heartache. I don’t know how bad it is for you. But what I do know is what Easter Saturday tells us.

Easter Saturday is the day of egg hunts, marshmallow Peeps, and photos with pastel bunnies. Our culture embraces Easter as a commercial holiday to celebrate the arrival of spring with new clothes, colored eggs, and more chocolate sales than any other holiday except Halloween. Hollywood co-opted Easter by creating a grand musical Easter Parade with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. It’s a love story with lots of dancing. What does this day of cultural fun and games have to do with healing your heartache?

In the biblical story of Easter, Jesus is killed on Friday and rises from the dead on Sunday to wipe away our sins. At first glance, Easter Saturday appears empty but with some examination may reveal God’s deep love for us and how we cope with the worst events in our lives. For Jesus’s disciples, on Saturday there was nothing but unbelievable loss, devastation, and confusion. Not a happy day. Not a moderately bad day. Saturday was the most miserable of sad days, when everything the disciples believed was shattered into a zillion pieces, and they were left to visit the grave of the man who had personified hope. They were devastated, not merely disappointed. Their world was demolished.

Saturday was a bleak place to be for the disciples while Satan celebrated in the streets because it looked like Jesus’s claim that he was the Son of God was destroyed. Is that how you feel? Like Satan is dancing while you wonder where God is in the midst of your circumstances? Eventually, we all come to a point of great loss or heartache and feel alone, betrayed, or abandoned. We pray, we scramble to read our Bible and still find ourselves alone. A feeling of desperation and fear can creep in, and we wonder if our lives will ever be normal again or even close to normal. In our deepest place of knowing, our circumstances scream at us that normal has fled. Normal has left the building, never to be seen again.

Our hearts hurt—truly physically hurt with a throbbing ache—and our body fatigues. Where can we find hope? Saturday.

Hundreds of clients have come through my Psychologist door, all desperately seeking help and hope. All of them searching for how to regain their footing in life after something difficult altered their lives in unbelievable ways. Many have faced tragedies I never imagined could happen to people.

Life has ways of brutalizing us: abuse, getting fired, betrayal, a horrible accident, war, death of our dearest loved one, a diagnosis, addiction, multiple layers of crises. The list of what can rob us of joy is endless. You may recognize that feeling of sadness even when surrounded by people who love you. Perhaps your joy has been stripped away. I am here to encourage you and offer you hope. I don’t want you to be alone in your journey through heartache. The challenge of how you survive is at stake.

This is the place where Saturday enters your story. It is that uncertain and painful time when healing has not happened . . . yet. It may feel over, whatever that means in your situation. But Saturday from the Easter story emphatically proves that yet is the operative word. Certainly, the healing will not look anything like you thought it would be or could be. Easter Friday obliterated that hope. Saturday arrives after the unbelievable suffering and defeat of Easter Friday and before the wonderful transformation of Sunday resurrection.

I’ve lived in Saturday, and I’ve helped hundreds of people in their Saturdays of heartache and loss. It is a horrid place to be. Everything you thought to be safe or just or true has exploded with change, and you can do nothing about it. Nothing. When people and events are purely out of our control, it can change our world so drastically that we no longer even recognize our own life.

Yet Easter Saturday also reveals God’s heart for us in our most confusing and upsetting life events. I discovered its comfort during my own anguish when my son was diagnosed with an incurable, life-threatening disease. I wondered how God could allow such awfulness to come to a child and questioned why my son wasn’t spared this heavy burden. I wept daily for over a year as we struggled to adapt to living with a relentless disease. I’ve also lived in a Saturday time before I was a person of faith, and my heartache drove me into a depression so deep that nothing mattered anymore, not even my own life. Hope no longer existed because I had no source of hope other than myself.

There is a tremendous difference between having Saturday hope and having no hope. First Thessalonians 4:13 says, Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. Notice there is an expectation that you will grieve but in a different way than those who have no hope. Saturday hope says we mourn, we have heartache, and we question, but we know our story on earth and in eternity does not end in the dark, oppressive pain of Saturday. No, our story continues to Sunday, a season when we are repaired or reconciled or changed into an entirely new person. Our hope carries us through the darkness. We don’t stop in the black hole of pain. We grab on to the smallest bit of faith we can find, and we hang on because our very life depends on it.

God could have written the Easter story any way he wanted, but he chose to make it a three-day story, not a two-year story or a day-and-a-half story. Day one is unbearable heartache and death. Day three is glorious healing and redemption beyond our wildest dreams. And day two is silent, overlooked, ignored. Our culture fills it with egg hunts and Easter baskets of toys and chocolate bunnies. Our churches fill it with nothing because the church focuses on what is coming on Sunday. The church largely misses one of the richest sources of hope by focusing ahead to the grand events of Sunday.

But the disciples didn’t have the cushioned luxury of knowing that redemption and new life were coming. They sat in the darkness of Saturday and may have wondered if they could recover and how they could piece their lives back together. Looking around at their shattered beliefs and collapsed journey, nothing made sense.

Perhaps that is where you find yourself. Shattered dreams, unspeakable grief, alone and wondering how in the world this awfulness could have happened to you and the people you love.

That, my friends, is the true Easter Saturday, and I think the Christian community has missed an incredible resource for ministering to our deepest pains and heartaches. God had his reasons to make it a three-day story, and I have some good theories about why he created this second day, the day after the worst day in our lives. Saturday holds comfort and promise and, dare I say, hope.

Today you may not see any possible Easter Sunday kind of hope for your situation. So, I invite you to bring your fears with you and step into this unearthing of the second day of the Easter story. I don’t want you to be alone on Saturday, and I think the discovery of hope that underlies Easter Saturday will be a powerful message to bolster you with the belief that you can recover, heal, and thrive.

CHAPTER 1

The Power of Hope

Saturday principle: God assures us that he is at work in the midst of our heartache, even though we may not feel it or experience it.

THE LAST TWO and a half years had knocked me off my feet physically and emotionally. I felt battered as if I’d been thrown into a raging river, tumbled over jagged rocks, and pulled by the undertow until there was no part of me that was without bruises or cuts. At times I couldn’t breathe from how fast and furious life had given me a new crisis before I could deal with the two previous ones. Heartache on top of distress and then multiplied.

And now here I was at Ground Zero, two months after the terrorist attack, expected to hand out hope when mine was in short supply. As I stood at the gaping hole that used to be the Twin Towers, my heartaches paled in comparison to what I was witnessing in New York. I couldn’t grasp what I was seeing. There was a mound of wreckage several stories high and a crater hundreds of feet deep. So massive was the crater that the people in the bottom of the pit looked like ants, and the enormous pile of rubble was several city blocks square. I’d seen the images on TV, but it did not prepare me for this pit of hell that seemed to have no end. There were odd structures sticking up in the air, pieces of what might once have been a stairwell, or an office for an accountant. Long strands of cable and pieces of walls hung from random, unrecognizable pillars of debris.

The air was thick with a dense, hazy fog because the sky was filled with relentless plumes of smoke and dust. A powerful jet of water shot out of an unseen source and vainly attempted to tamp down the smog-like air. Several buildings on the edge of this large canyon of wreckage were sheltered by orange tarp coverings, their windows blown out and odd pieces of some other structure piercing their sides. I wondered how many buildings in total had been damaged.

The night air was filled with the constant beeping of large machines backing up and cranes pulling up steel girding and large sections of unidentifiable somethings. Trucks the size of buildings were moving debris from one place to another. The sound of jackhammers ricocheted among the structures. Temporary lights, like those at a huge football stadium, standing many stories tall, illuminated the scene. No one spoke, but crowds of people were witnesses at this mass grave. Behind me were temporary walls covered in photos of loved ones with messages to call if found, a mournful reminder of how we can cling to hope even when we rationally know all is lost.

I was with five counseling colleagues on a mission to provide counseling services to first responders and to equip clergy on how to minister to trauma survivors. The unimaginable horrors we heard from those working at Ground Zero and the visual destruction left us shaken and doubtful our small efforts would make a dent in the needs of the New Yorkers.

The volume of pain and the overwhelming problems were louder and bigger here at Ground Zero, far more than my personal heartache, but the need was the same: hope and healing. That’s what we all yearn for when heartache upends our life. Our cry is, Please let something be better, or Send me something to soothe my pain.

Saturday, a crossroads of need and longing. The day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

LET ME EXPLAIN how I came to the idea that Saturday is when we cry out for healing. I had no way to know on a blustery spring day that in a few hours we’d be at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital ER, fending off fear and trying to comprehend the doctor’s words. Some suffering strikes suddenly. Type 1 diabetes is present but hidden until one day it explodes into your awareness with sky-rocketing blood sugars, a defunct pancreas, and massive fear of the next extreme dip that could bring death. The year following that fateful spring day was an hour-by-hour existence trying to learn how to calculate carbohydrates, serving sizes, and insulin doses.

While in the