Mary stood close enough to the cross to hear every gasp and groan from her son, Jesus. She even heard his silence. The same hands she once held as a newborn were now held by nails cruelly driven through them. The promise she received decades earlier couldn’t have been anticipated to look like this! Not like this kind of pain. Not like this type of loss. Not like a cross. From Jesus’ birth up until his triumphant arrival in Jerusalem on “Palm Sunday,” Mary’s expectations were much loftier, yet now she finds herself at the foot of the cross. With a myriad of choices before her, she chose the one that might be the most excruciating of them all. She chose to stay by Jesus’ side. 

This Sabbath, we’ll step into Mary’s perspective at the cross. We’ll step into the tension between promise and reality, and wrestle with a question many of us quietly have asked ourselves: What do you do when God’s promise doesn’t look like what we expected?