Sunrise, pressing back the cold dark of the night.

I sat shivering, the suit pants my parents had bought me for this Easter Sunday chafing against my legs, the necktie too tight around my neck.

The deacons had set chairs in the grass down in the valley to mimic pews so we could watch the sun ascend the hill with the church's steeple, affixed at its peak with a cross, silhouetted against the rays of morning. The scene of this sunrise service represented life conquering death, the hope of eternity in a world of suffering – a hope found only in Christ.

Midnight, rockets raining upon hospitals, schools, apartments, innocents. Fathers torn from families, rounded up like cattle, cast into concentration camps. Rising expenses overwhelming savings as bank accounts dwindle to nothing. Hope evaporating as chaos reigns.

I sit frozen, eyes locked onto my screen as my thumb swipes the screen, endless scrolling, endless despair.

The world feels dark, the rays of light I thought I had seen over the past few years now swallowed whole by the inky black letters of executive orders, by the hollow echoes of man's sinful hearts. Good Friday is past now, the day in which we remember Christ's death at the hands of the government and at the behest of the religious leaders of his day. Holy Saturday is past now, the day in which we sit in grief and we mourn and we acknowledge that darkness is real and powerful and present.

Easter Sunday has come, and with it I am supposed to celebrate the return of light, cresting that hill, overpowering the darkness and pressing it back into the realm of memory, of yesterday. The lilies bloom, their long-dormant bulbs erupting into brilliant flower.

But the world remains in darkness. Rockets still reign. How can I celebrate when the tomb is filled each day with bodies and bodies and bodies? Hope is a dream, an aspiration, not a flower I can hold in my hands today. The resurrection feels like little more than a cruel reminder that we remain in the grasp of grief.

I have no solution, no pithy advice to turn despair into hope today. But there is one idea in which I find some comfort:

As it has for millennia, Easter Sunday will come again next year. Maybe then, I will see brighter glimmers of hope. Maybe then the world will be turning toward daylight, arcing ever-slowly toward life.

And if it is not, then I will know that Easter Sunday will come yet again the next year. And the year after that. In this remembrance, I press on: The resurrection does not erase the darkness, but darkness is not the end of the story.