The Letter She Couldn't Open

When Hurricane Katrina swept through Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2005, Margaret Trosclair evacuated with nothing but her purse and her dog. She spent eleven days in a shelter in Jackson, certain her home of thirty-two years was gone. When the postal service finally resumed, a letter arrived from her insurance company. She held it for three days without opening it. Her neighbor in the shelter, a retired mail carrier named Earl, asked her why. "Because once I read it," she said, "it's real. Right now I can still pretend there's something to go back to."

Earl nodded. "Or," he said gently, "it could be good news you're not ready for."

Margaret opened the letter that evening. Full coverage approved. Her home had survived — damaged but standing. She told a reporter later that she sat on her cot and trembled, not from grief, but because she had rehearsed loss so thoroughly that she had no script for restoration.

The women who walked to that tomb in the gray Jerusalem dawn carried spices for a corpse. They had prepared for death. They had practiced their grief. When the young man in white said, "He is risen; He is not here," Mark tells us they fled trembling and astonished, and said nothing to anyone. They were afraid — not of bad news, but of news so good it unmade everything they thought they knew. Sometimes the Almighty's answer is so far beyond our hopeless expectations that we need a moment before we can even speak it aloud.