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FROM VICTIM TO VICTORIOUS:
The Holy Work of Holy Week
Suffering. It’s all around us. It’s unavoidable.
I don’t need to reference breaking headlines or global disasters. Just look around your circle. Friends. Family. Neighbors.
The mother who buried her son and still sets his place at the table.
The father laid off after decades, staring at bills with trembling hands.
The woman who gave her life to raising children who no longer call.
The couple whose dream home lies in ruin from a flood they couldn’t predict.
And what makes these stories hit hardest is this: they’re not faithless people. These are devout Christians. People who pray. People who seek God’s grace daily. People who could quote Scripture, lead Bible studies, even give compelling talks on redemptive suffering.
But when the storm rolls in—and it will—when it crashes through the walls of your life, there’s a dividing line that quietly, unmistakably appears. And it's not between the religious and the irreligious. It’s between those who know about Jesus… and those who know Him.
Between those who try to fit suffering into their theology—
And those who allow suffering to become their theology.
I’ve watched this distinction play out in real time—in people I love, in strangers I’ve met, and most honestly, in my own heart. When suffering visits, when control is lost, when things don’t work out the way we prayed and pleaded for—they break. We break.
And it’s there—in the raw, jagged confusion—that something either hardens… or opens.
Because despite what we say we believe, many of us live as though the presence of suffering means the absence of God. Like pain is evidence that the deal has gone bad. That we’ve been shortchanged. That the prayers didn’t work. And underneath that ache is the quiet belief that we were owed something better. That faith should have worked like an umbrella—and we’re drenched anyway.
We treat Christianity like a contract: I do good, and You bless me.
But God never offered a contract. He offered a covenant.
And covenants aren’t written in ink. They’re written in blood.
We often don’t realize it, but suffering exposes our deepest spiritual assumptions. And for many of us, those assumptions are malformed. We want a Savior—but not a Cross. We want redemption—but not relinquishment. We want Jesus to walk beside us—but not necessarily within us, through cruciform surrender.
But Holy Week doesn’t give us that option.
This week is not a memorial. It’s a mirror.
It doesn’t just recount what Jesus did. It reveals what He’s still doing.
In you. In me. In every broken piece of life we’d rather discard.
Because here’s the truth: the invitation of Christianity is not to observe the Passion—it’s to enter it.
Not alone. Not in despair. But with Christ who has already gone before us, and who now longs to live His victory through us.
Not beside us.
In us.
There’s no sugar-coating the Cross. It’s splintered. It’s heavy. It’s lonely.
It feels like abandonment, even from God.
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”—Jesus didn’t pretend that suffering was easy.
He entered it to its absolute depths.
And yet—somehow—that is where the greatest glory is born.
Because resurrection doesn’t come after suffering is fixed.
It comes through it.
This is the mystery most of us would rather avoid. But it is the mystery that transforms.
When we finally surrender our grip—on expectations, on demands, on the illusion that we’re owed a pain-free life—when we stop playing the victim before God and instead offer our wounds to Him as gifts, something changes.
Something shifts.
Something dies.
But something greater is born.
We begin to see our suffering not as abandonment by God, but union with Him.
We begin to taste the strange joy that only those forged in fire understand.
We become—not weaker—but freer.
Not more bitter—but more loving.
Not resigned—but resurrected.
This is not a call to stoicism. This is not a denial of grief.
We weep. We wail. Jesus did too.
But we do not suffer as those without hope.
Because He has entered our suffering. And now He invites us to enter His victory.
The invitation this Holy Week is not just to admire Christ’s cross—but to carry our own, with Him in us.
This is the journey from victim to victorious.
Not through willpower. Not through pretending everything is okay.
But through surrender.
Through the mysterious, costly, cruciform yes.
The yes that says: “Lord, this shattered life—it’s all Yours.”
The yes that allows His light to pour through the cracks.
The yes that makes space for the breath of heaven in the ashes of earth.
That’s the freedom we’re promised.
Not the absence of suffering, but the presence of Christ within it.
And that changes everything.
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