We have just begun the season of Lent, the forty days and six Sundays of reflection, penitence, and preparation for the Easter to come. Lent culminates in some of the darkest hours in history — the events of Holy Thursday, Good 
Friday, and Black Saturday.
Those were the hours when it seemed to observers that God was absent, silent, and missing. But in those same hours, when it seemed to us that God was doing the least, God was doing his greatest work. In those darkest, darkest hours when it seemed that God was inactive, God was actually the most active. Because those darkest hours were the epicenter of the salvation of humanity. Those would be the hours that for literally thousands of years, people all over the world would look back to and rejoice over God’s goodness and grace.
It’s a difficult message, and it’s a hard message, but if you live long enough it also becomes your experience: that God seems to take broken things and do his most amazing work. God often seems to wait until the last minute — but God tends to take busted-up, broken, hopeless situations and show up not in the way we would choose. Because we would never allow things to get as bad 
as oftentimes they get. But this is God’s way. The greatest things begin in the greatest messes.
The most amazing works of God are generally launched at a time of great personal or corporate brokenness. However, it helps to remember that the story of salvation was birthed at a time of extraordinary darkness, and extraordinary uncertainty. Although life is uncertain, God is not uncertain. God is still here, and this is still God’s world.
