Holy week.

Romania celebrates Easter on the Eastern (Orthodox) calendar, meaning that this year we're a week behind our families in the US.  Easter will be April 12, and so this is the week of waiting.

For me, this week has been full of work.  I am frantically working to finish some big projects for work before Easter comes, before we head to the annual CRWM retreat and meetings and IMPACT international trainings.  It's been hard to keep my head above water this week, much less take time for sober reflection on Jesus.

But it hit me in a flash of revelation last night, as I was eating a hurried dinner before returning to my work, that perhaps this frantic-ness and sense of desperation is part of what Holy Week is about.  That my mixed-up longings (for Easter celebrations, to finally break our Lenten fast, for a much-longed-for break from work, to be done with a stressful project) are largely selfish, and yet they are producing in me a real longing for this coming Sunday.  I may not be entirely pure of heart, but it does feel right to be desperately hoping for the coming of Easter.  And it's a reminder, when I can lift my head up and think about it for a second, that even though I am just like the fickle crowds who wanted Jesus for their own purposes, I am still cared for.  Cared for enough that God would die for me.  And the things that worry me are already overcome in His victory.

On Saturday we visited some friends in Sibiu, and on Sunday morning we decided to go to the Orthodox church there for Palm Sunday services.  The Orthodox church in Sibiu is enchanting -- gorgeously painted with the stories of the Bible on every surface, and blessed by priests and a choir with the most beautiful voices I have ever heard in a church.  (The first time Jack and I visited Sibiu we heard their liturgy being sung from blocks away, and like cartoon characters sniffing a wafting aroma, tails wagging, we followed the sound to the church, where we stood in awe.)

This Sunday was no different, except that the church was packed.  The liturgy was beautiful, the choir glorious, and the church was full, shoulder-to-shoulder while a thin line of people wove their way through the middle to kiss the icons of Jesus and Mary near the front.  In the crowd there was plenty of sniffling and coughing, rustling of plastic bags and the occasional cell phone -- and yet somehow it was still transfixing.  Jack reminded me afterwards of how some church fathers had written about how, during the liturgy, they couldn't tell if they were on earth or in heaven, and at that service I felt like I suddenly knew what they meant.  The heavenly music, the beautiful art, the warm light -- and the sniffling, awkward crowd of humans -- all adoring the God who came down from that perfection to stand in our midst as we shuffle and clear our throats and hush our children.  Heaven and earth, intermingled.

And so rather than berating myself for being too caught up in work this week, I am embracing the fact that this is what life on earth looks like -- deadlines and stress and wrestling and work -- and that even so, if I just look up, there is Holy Week.  Holy and full of light and present and hopeful, even in our broken humanity.  They co-exist, if we just have eyes to see.