Holy Saturday is one of the few days in our liturgical year that there is not a Mass assigned, meaning that the readings for the day — the Easter Vigil Mass — are all geared towards Easter.

Liturgically, we do not celebrate anything on Holy Saturday. It is empty, and we are meant to just kind of… wait. I have always appreciated the tension of this day. It is sandwiched between Good Friday, the day that we commemorate the brutal death of Jesus and asked to share in the the utter anguish that his family and friends felt as they watched him die for us on the cross — and Easter Sunday, the day that we celebrate Jesus’ rising from the dead and epic victory over sin and death.

Between these two emotion-packed days is Holy Saturday, where we are just expected to sit and wait.

Every year on this day I like to imagine myself as one of Jesus’ friends who had heard him declare that he would rise again on the third day. I can imagine that they spent the first Holy Saturday in total anxiety — unsure of whether their friend was actually coming back or if he was gone for good. They were expected to just sit and wait for what was to come.

I don’t know about you, but I am terrible at sitting and waiting, which makes this being my favorite day a little ironic. I am always very eager to get to the punch line of things. I am one of those people who reads the last page of a book before I even begin. I find waiting patiently very difficult, and often struggle to keep my patience the longer I have to wait. However, as I have grown in my spirituality, I have come to see that growth, hope, and joy are in the waiting.

Without the waiting part, we would never be able to enjoy the punch line as much. Without the middle of the book, the end would never make sense.

And so today we wait, just as Jesus’ friends and family did on the first Holy Saturday. We prepare for the coming of our Savior in whatever way we choose — maybe you are spending today making food for tomorrow’s festivities, or dying Easter eggs with your kids like we are in the McCormick House.

Wherever you find yourself today, I challenge you to settle into the spirit of waiting and the quiet tension that comes with today. Perhaps, just as it does for me, today will teach you that all good things are worth waiting for.

I leave you today with my favorite prayer, “Patient Trust.” I hope that it will guide you today and in all of your future waiting:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on,
 as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Devon McCormick is the Director of Campus Ministry at Fairfield Prep.