Resurrected in love.

They dropped their nets.
They walked away from their tax ledgers, their boats, their families.
They followed a man who hadn’t written a book, held a position, or accumulated power.
They followed him because he looked into their eyes and saw them.
Really saw them.

It’s easy to romanticize the Apostles — the Twelve, and the women and others who followed Jesus from Galilee to Golgotha. But pause for a moment. Imagine what it cost.
They didn’t know how the story would end.
They didn’t follow Jesus with a resurrection guarantee in hand.
They followed with hearts open and trembling.

Grief on Holy Saturday

What I can’t stop thinking about is the space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
That long, cruel Saturday.
That space of disorientation.

This man they loved — not admired, not worked for, but loved — had been taken. Publicly tortured. Shamed. And they had scattered.

Can we name what they must have felt?

Shame.
Doubt.
Fear.
Heartbreak.

It is one thing to lose a friend. It is another to lose the person you built your life around — the one who had redefined your very identity. When Jesus died, the disciples didn’t just lose him. They lost their why. Their future unraveled.

And yet.

The Resurrection Changed Everything

When Mary Magdalene ran to them with words they could barely comprehend — “I have seen the Lord!” — the world tilted on its axis again.
Jesus stood among them, bearing the wounds. He spoke peace into their fear. And they believed again.

But not just in a quiet, comforted way.
They believed with fire.
With boldness.
With a love that said: If this is real, then everything else fades away.

Peter, who had denied him.
Thomas, who had doubted.
Mary, who had wept at the tomb.
They all rose up — broken, healed, alive — and began the Church.

These weren’t men and women of institutional power. They didn’t build churches with budgets and constitutions. They carried the Gospel in their skin, on their breath, through their scars.

The Church began in upper rooms and whispered prayers and dangerous proclamations.
It began not with strength, but with resurrected love.

Resilience Rooted in Love

What inspires me most is their resilience.
Not the hard, stoic kind — but the resurrected kind.

The kind that knows death
but doesn’t flinch.

The kind that saw Jesus ascend into heaven
and walked back into a suspicious, violent world with a Spirit-filled heart and no backup plan.

They knew fear.
They knew trauma.
And still — they loved. They taught. They led. They forgave.
They lived the memory of Jesus with such integrity that entire cities were transformed.

Following in Their Footsteps

We, too, are disciples.
We live in the space between grief and resurrection.
We walk through disappointment, betrayal, and loss — and still, the call remains: Follow me.

The early Church wasn’t built by perfect people.
It was built by those who had fallen apart and found themselves remade by grace.

What a beautiful foundation.
What a trembling, Spirit-drenched beginning.

And what a challenge to us.

We are the inheritors of their courage.
Not to replicate their lives — but to live our own with the same costly, astonishing, resurrected love.