Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

Our reading titled Not So was written by Tim Gustafson.

I wanted somehow to make it not so, lamented the man eulogizing a friend who died young.

His words gave poignancy to humanity's ageless heart cry.

Death stuns and scars us all.

We ache to undo what can't be undone.

The longing to make it not so might well describe how Jesus' followers felt after his death. The Gospels say little

about those awful hours, but they do record the actions of a few faithful friends. In Luke

23, Joseph, a religious leader who secretly believed in Jesus, suddenly found the courage to

ask Pilate for Jesus' body. Ponder for a moment

what it would take to remove a body from a grisly crucifixion and tenderly prepare it for burial.

Consider, too, the devotion and bravery of the women who stayed with Jesus every step of the way,

even to the tomb. These followers weren't anticipating a resurrection.

They were coming to terms with grief.

The chapter ends without hope, merely a somber.

Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes to embalm Jesus' body, but they rested on the Sabbath

in obedience to the commandment.

Little did they know the Sabbath intermission was setting the stage for history's most dramatic

scene.

Jesus was about to do the unimaginable.

He would make death itself not so.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional scripture reading is from Luke chapter 23, verses 49 through 56.

...