There are mornings when you wake up, and it doesn’t feel like the sun will ever rise again.

And even when it does, it feels like it shouldn’t. That’s because everything has changed for you – the job was over, the relationship had ended, or the phone call had come; the diagnosis had been confirmed. Your life, as you knew it, had been turned upside down, and yet…the world just keeps moving around you, and it’s hard to believe that your personal world has been overturned, yet everything else is pretty much the same. 

But the sun still comes up, just like it does every day.

Perhaps that was what Mary felt like, as recorded in John 20 when she went to the tomb of Jesus early in the morning. Everything she thought she knew had been upended over the past couple of days, yet there was the sun, coming up again as if nothing had happened. 

Yet something had happened. The stone had been moved. The tomb was empty. And Mary was overcome with grief.

As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize it was Jesus.

He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him” (John 20:11-15).

It was Jesus. 

In the midst of her pain, darkness, and confusion – Jesus was there. 

And in reflecting upon this encounter with Jesus, there are at least two things we can learn about our own encounters with the Lord:

1. Encounters with Jesus often come when we aren’t looking for them.

How could Mary not have recognized Jesus? The simplest answer is that she wasn’t looking for Him. Not there. Not in the midst of sorrow and grief. Not right in the place where everything seemed to be going so terribly wrong. And yet there He was.

Surely we would never encounter Jesus in the midst of an ordinary day. Yet those are precisely the times when we meet with Jesus. He is not restricted to the spectacular; indeed, Jesus has always made it His pattern to come to us in the most ordinary way imaginable. We would do well to recognize that every moment of every day is an opportunity to experience the presence and see the work of Jesus Christ.

2. We often don’t recognize the presence of Jesus until later.

At that moment, Mary was confused. Grief-stricken. Sorrowful. And it was not until later – granted, not much later – but certainly not at first – that she recognized Jesus. And so it is with us.

During days of pain and difficulty, we are prone to throw up our hands and ask the Lord where He is and what He is doing. And yet He is there. We don’t recognize Him, but He is there. It is only often, with the benefit of time and reflection, that we are able to recognize an encounter with Jesus. Often, it’s only after the fact that we can see that He was right there with us, and not just with us but right in the middle of what was happening at the moment. 

So it was with Mary, and so it is with us. Let us be patient during seasons of sorrow, knowing that with the benefit of time, we will be able to look back and see that Jesus was always there, working for our good.

Written by Michael Kelley, Guest Contributor

To read more of Michael’s writing, check out his daily blog, Forward Progress http://michaelkelley.co/