The Bleakest Room I Was Ever In

A Reflection on Easter Saturday

It was a couple of years ago, Easter Saturday. Leah and I were in the Emergency Room (A&E) — nothing major, just something that couldn’t wait and no GPs were open on the holiday weekend. We ended up sat there for hours, surrounded by people whose pain went way beyond the physical.

Hospitals visits are never good, but this particular time felt darker than normal. The whole place was heavy. Flat. Sad. Fluorescent lights buzzing above us, the sharp smell of disinfectant, quiet murmurs broken up by alarms and shouting. Time becomes frozen quickly when you are waiting for relief from pain —and the outside world was a distant memory even though it was only two sliding doors away.

Opposite us sat a lad in his early twenties. Bloodstained bandage across his forehead. Apparently, he was a well-known YouTuber and had filmed himself skateboarding off a wall before ending up here.

Near the front doors was an agitated woman in a wheelchair. Tattoos covered her arms. No legs. She was shouting at the nurses, desperate for medication. The staff obviously knew her from previous visits. She wasn’t coping, and everyone could feel it. No-one could escape her presence - especially herself.

To our right, an Indian woman kept fall off her chair. Her body folding to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. She convulsed. Staff ran over. Alarms blared. Then it happened again. Her dignity, bit by bit, disappearing in front of us.

We didn’t want to be there.

Nobody wanted to be there.

Except the drunk man in the corner. Loud. Oblivious. Making phone calls every ten minutes to tell someone — anyone — how drunk he was. He was the only one who looked pleased to be there.

This was the bleakest of rooms — just a few square feet, but a microcosm of a world full of broken bodies, frayed nerves, and quiet despair.

This was Easter Saturday.

Then, behind me, I became aware of a quiet conversation between two strangers — a man and a woman who, like the rest of us, had been thrown together by painful circumstance.

I didn’t catch the start, but at one point the woman asked,
“So… what brings you in?”

The man paused, then said, almost matter-of-factly,
“Tried to take my own life last night. Just trying to get some help.”

There was no more detail. Just another example of the pain in the room.

After a moment, the woman spoke again earnestly.
“Can I share something with you?”

That question caught my attention. Not because of what she said, but how she said it. Soft. Careful. Like she was offering something meaningful — almost like she was about to share good news.

The man must have thought the same as me. He looked over and replied, calmly but clearly:
“Yeah that’s fine… you can say something…. unless it’s about Jesus.”
“Because He doesn’t come back till Sunday.”

And there it was.

A line that sounded like a joke — but wasn’t.
A sentence that summed up the whole room.

I didn’t hear much after that. I think she shared something of her own story — about her own poor mental health, maybe. I couldn’t catch it all. But there was no offer of certainty. No rescue plan. Just one wounded person offering something to another.

And I sat there in the middle of it all — pain on every side, and that line echoing in my head:

“Because He doesn’t come back till Sunday.”

That’s Easter Saturday.

The day of silence. The day in between.
The day after it all falls apart, but before anything is put back together.

You don’t have to be in a physical waiting room to feel like that — weighed down by waiting, just hoping something shifts.

Everyone in that room was desperate for a resurrection.

We don’t preach many sermons on Easter Saturday. It’s too uncomfortable. Too quiet. Too unresolved.

But most of life isn’t lived on Friday’s hill or Sunday’s sunrise.

It’s lived in hospital waiting rooms.
In unanswered prayers.
In long nights and silent mornings.

It’s lived in the space between the wound and the healing.

And yet — even here — the silence isn’t empty.
Saturday holds something.

Because if Sunday really is coming, there’s still hope for every broken body in that waiting room.

• For the fallen influencer — still bleeding, still trying to prove they are worthy of being seen.

• For the woman in the wheelchair — still shouting, still longing for peace from herself.

• For the one who keeps collapsing — losing control, but not losing God’s attention.

• For the man calling the same number again and again — searching for connection in all the wrong places.

There’s hope for every story that feels stuck in the silence.

“But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”
– Acts 2:24

Because Sunday is coming.
And when it does —
The silence breaks.
The waiting ends.
Death is undone.

And the new day finally begins.