The Morning the Bridge Appeared

On February 6, 2023, residents of Hatay Province in southern Turkey woke to devastation. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake had leveled entire neighborhoods overnight. Rescue worker Elif Kaya described arriving at dawn to a collapsed apartment building where families had been sleeping just hours before. Everything familiar was gone — streets unrecognizable, landmarks erased. Then her team heard tapping beneath the rubble. A woman named Aleyna, trapped for fourteen hours, was pulled out alive. Elif later told reporters she stood there trembling, unable to speak. "I came expecting to recover bodies," she said. "I was not prepared to find someone breathing."

That trembling is exactly what Mark describes on Easter morning. The women came to anoint a corpse. They had packed burial spices the way we pack tissues for a funeral — prepared for finality. Instead, the stone was rolled back and a messenger declared the unthinkable: "He has risen." Mark tells us they fled, trembling and bewildered.

We misread their silence as weakness. It was not. It was the stunned overwhelm of people whose grief had been ambushed by something too enormous to process. They had come prepared for death and walked into the presence of resurrection.

The Almighty does not always meet us in our composure. Sometimes He meets us in our trembling — when the thing we were bracing to endure has already been overcome.