I’m not religious. But I’ve always been fascinated by the Easter story as a map of what the soul actually goes through.

And the part that always gets me is when he came back, no one recognized him.

I mean, Mary Magdalene was standing right there. She was the one who loved him most. And she thought he was the gardener. The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked with him for hours and had no idea who they were talking to.

He came back, but he didn’t come back the same.

That’s the part no one talks about.

What comes back changed

We love resurrection as a concept. It’s the comeback, the rising, the triumphant return.

But the actual experience of it is disorienting, for everyone, because when something in you dies, and you come back from it, you don’t return as the person you were. You return as someone new. And the people who knew you, loved you, counted on the old version of you, might not recognize who’s standing in front of them.

That’s the cost of transformation.

You can’t go through a death and come back unchanged. That’s not how it works. The whole point is that something had to end for something else to begin.

The part that costs something

I’ve sat with a lot of folks in the aftermath of this. The divorce that broke them open, the loss that restructured everything, and the identity they had to bury before they could become who they actually are.

So, I’ve seen firsthand that the resurrection part isn’t the hard part.

The hard part is letting the people around you meet the new version, and tolerating their confusion (and grief, even), because they’re mourning someone who isn’t coming back. The old you. The one they understood.

And you have to stand there, in your new skin, and let them catch up. Or not.

Some won’t.

The belief that won’t survive this week

“If I’ve really changed, people should be able to see it.”

They might not. Not right away, and maybe not ever.

Mary Magdalene was looking directly at him and didn’t recognize him. To me, that’s the point of the story. Transformation doesn’t announce itself. It confuses people by breaking the pattern they were expecting.

Your job isn’t to convince anyone that you’ve changed.

Your job is to keep living as the person you’ve become.

Why this matters this week

We’ve been building toward something. Eclipse season cleared the ground. Then the spring equinox started the new cycle. Last week, the foundation started going in.

And now, Easter week, we arrive at the part of the story where what was buried starts to rise.

But it won’t look the way you expected.

It might not even look like you, at first.

That’s okay, because that’s how resurrection actually works. You come back different. Unrecognizable. But definitely more yourself than you’ve ever been, and somehow a stranger at the same time.

Let them think you’re the gardener.

You know who you are.

Jonni

P.S. Some people think best out loud. They need a voice on the other end, someone to talk it through with in real time. Others need to write it out. A midnight text, a rambling email, the thing they can’t say until they see it on the screen. I work both ways. Sessions for the talkers. Unlimited for the writers. You know which one you are. 

P.P.S. However you spend this weekend, whether it’s sacred or secular or just a good excuse for chocolate, I hope something in you gets to rest. And maybe rise. 😉