A Season of Lint: Good Friday
April 3, 2026
There are things in my life I cannot fix.
Earlier this week I pulled one of my favorite shirts out of the dryer and —Dag Nabbit! — discovered an unexpected stain on the sleeve.
Then I remembered splooshing coffee on the sleeve of my black cardigan sweater. I was busy zooming around and didn’t think about it soaking through to the light colored shirt I had on underneath.
Time and a trip through the dryer meant the stain was probably set.
Hoping against hope, I tried treating the stain after the fact. A healthy squirt of blue Dawn and a second wash. Stain sticks, lye soap, and yet another wash. But in the end, I have a fantastically clean shirt…with a stain that never completely disappeared.
There are things like that: something that, once stained or broken, can’t be brought back to the way it was.
If you’ve lived long enough, you probably know something about that, too.
A conversation that ended badly.
A relationship that unexpectedly changed shape.
A moment when words came out sharper than we intended.
Or words that never came at all.
Time doesn’t rewind, and while apologies may matter, they can’t always restore what once was.
Where Good Friday Meets Us
This is the place Good Friday meets us. Not where everything has been resolved, but in the broken places.
The story of Good Friday is not a story about quick rescue. It’s a story about God in flesh made manifest, stepping fully into the human condition.
The story of Good Friday is a mess of betrayal, abandonment, misunderstanding, and pain.
And right there in the center of the Good Friday story we find Jesus. He doesn’t stand apart from our brokenness — he stands inside it.
Inside the places where we have missed the mark.
Inside the places where repair arrived too late.
Inside the places where something precious has already been lost.
The remarkable thing about the story of Good Friday is not that Jesus escapes suffering.
It’s that he does not walk away.
He doesn’t defend himself or seek to silence the crowd. Even when he’s encouraged to come down from the cross…
He stays.
The God Who Stays
In a world where broken things are easily discarded, the cross tells a different story.
It shows us God doesn’t abandon the human story at its most painful point.
Not the places where we’ve missed the mark.
Not the places we wish we for do-overs or rewinds.
Not even the places we cannot fix.
Which means all those messy, unfinished places in our lives — the stained relationships, the conversations that never happened, the marks that remain — are not places God avoids or walks away from.
He stays.
A Question and an Invitation
A Question: Where in your life are you carrying something that cannot be repaired — at least not by you?
An Invitation: Today may not be a day to solve it. Instead, it may simply be a day to sit honestly with it. Name the broken place. Acknowledge where the mark was missed. And focus on how the Good Friday story illustrates the lengths to which God will go to show us we are not abandoned.
Because sometimes faith isn’t about fixing what is broken, it’s about trusting that we are not alone in it.
Like the coffee-stained shirt I pulled from the wash, we must acknowledge that, while the mark is still there, grace has not walked away from us because of it.
With you in the clearing,
Coming Sunday: The story is not over.