On a whim…

John 20:27 NRSV

“Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

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Thomas is not there the first time.

He misses the moment the others describe—the presence, the voice, the showing of hands. By the time he hears it, it has already become testimony. Something reported. Something he is expected to accept.

He does not.

Unless I see… unless I touch…

It sounds like doubt.

It is something else.

Thomas refuses to say more than he can sustain as true. He will not borrow certainty from someone else’s experience. If this is real, it must be real in a way he can trust.

I understand that instinct.

I cannot insist that I feel her presence. It does not come when I ask for it. It does not remain when I try to hold it. Most mornings, I weep if I do not distract myself. That is what I can say with certainty.

And still, I cannot say she is gone.

Absence does not behave cleanly. It does not remain contained. Something in my experience resists that conclusion. Not enough to prove. Not enough to name. Enough that I cannot call it absence.

So I do not say that I know.

I say that I hold.

Thomas stands in a different place.

He will not hold what he has not encountered. He will not say that something is real until it meets him in a way he can trust.

And Jesus does not refuse him.

He does not correct him. He does not shame him for asking. He offers what Thomas requires.

Reach out your hand.

Touch.

The wounds remain.

Not erased. Not explained. Still present in the body that stands before him.

And Thomas answers.

My Lord and my God.

We often hear what comes next as a correction.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

But it may not be a rebuke.

It may be a description.

There are those who encounter and those who are asked to live without that kind of certainty. Those who are given something they can touch, and those who must remain inside something they cannot hold.

I find myself there.

Not seeing.

Not touching.

Not able to insist.

And yet, unable to say that nothing remains.

To live inside resurrection is not to feel presence consistently, or to prove it.

It is to discover that absence is no longer a sufficient explanation.

Thomas needed to touch in order to trust.

I am learning to trust what I cannot touch—and to admit how difficult that is.

God meets him in what he needs.

God meets me in what I cannot hold.

I do not yet know how both can be true.

But I will not reduce either one.

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Prayer

God, meet me in what I can touch and in what I cannot, and give me the courage to remain without resolving either.

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