Friday, April 10 was a dark hour.

A lot of Americans died of COVID-19.

It was also Good Friday, a day that many among us commemorated the crucifixion of Christ.

Jesus died on a cross at the hands of the Romans with the ascent of the Jews.

However, let’s be honest.

It wasn’t just the Romans and Jews bearing responsibility for His innocent death. It was all of us.

If you’ve seen Passion of the Christ then you’re aware of the crucifixion scene.- the one in which the nails are driven through Christ into the cross.

Did you know that Mel Gibson, the film’s director, chose to film that sequence with his hand holding the hammer and the nail? He understood, as should we all, that Christ died because of all of our sin.

We’re all responsible for what happened to Him. Whether it occurred on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday … or even a Monday … is irrelevant to the reality that we are responsible for His death.

His death led to the disciples’ darkest hour.

They hadn’t really understood that He taught them He was coming back, even from the dead. Like so many of us, they took His words as though He was coming back from an out-of-town trip, or a conquest, or maybe the market.

His disciples failed to fully realize His promise.

Aren’t we guilty of the same?

In our darkest hour, we tend to focus more on the affliction that we can see and often miss the promise of what is unseen. We tend to see failure, loss, frailty, and even death as the end. However, we have the promise informing us that they most certainly are not the end, but rather the substance of our pilgrimage.

“Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” -2 Corinthians 4:16-18

The thing about our darkest hour is that often we don’t realize that we are in it. Too often, we don’t see a path forward, or a way out. We only see the affliction of the moment.

Paul encourages us with the promise of the resurrection. Even if we are destroyed, we are being instead renewed. Our dark moments are just that – moments.

Yet, the character of God that can be developed in us through those moments is eternally glorious. So glorious that when we eventually enter the age to come, our current afflictions will not hold so much as a candle to the spectacular glory we will inherit.

So we don’t give up!

Rather we focus instead on the eternal that we cannot see and find the strength to overcome the temporary things we are bludgeoned with in our current circumstances.

Like Christ’s disciples, we linger in our darkest hour. They did so as He lay in the tomb. We do so as He tarries in His return. We don’t have to be defined by our darkest hour. But we can allow Christ to work in us during that dark hour so that His glory shines in us so magnificently through it that our endurance testifies to a world desperate for His light.