Where to Begin
Mark 16:1–5
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could embalm him. Very early on Sunday morning, as the sun rose, they went to the tomb. They worried out loud to each other, “Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?” Then they looked up, saw that it had been rolled back—it was a huge stone—and walked right in.
— Mark 16:1–5, The Message
It was three days before Easter morning, and I was standing in the middle of what I can only describe as a small disaster. The seasonal section at work—the one that’s supposed to draw customers in with bright colors and cheerful displays—looked like someone had simply opened a shipping container and walked away. Peeps on a stick stacked five high. Candy bags crowded to the edge of the shelf. Easter product of every kind crammed together without any logic I could make sense of. Four of us, ninety minutes, and a store that needed to be ready for customers by open.
The four of us, 3 of my coworkers and myself, just stood there for a second taking it in. The comments started right away. What happened here? Why does it look like this? We figured customers had been pulling things off the shelf, setting them down wherever, and moving on. The stocking had overstocked the section. Nobody had caught it before it got out of hand. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault—it just got away from everybody. And now it was ours to deal with.
I stood there for a moment and I thought: where do you even begin?
That morning in my devotional, I had been sitting with the women walking to the tomb in Mark 16. They had bought their spices. They knew what they needed to do. But as they walked, they were already asking each other the same kind of question I was asking on that Easter morning floor: who is going to roll the stone away? It was a huge stone. They had no good answer. They just kept walking anyway.
We decided to start small. Pick one aisle. Pick one section of one shelf. Pull everything that didn’t belong and set it aside. Don’t try to solve the whole mess at once—just clear enough space to see what you’re working with. Once we had that one section looking right, we moved to the next. And then the next. Ninety minutes later, the section was looking pretty good. Not perfect. But good enough that you could walk through it and find what you were looking for.
I’ve been thinking about that process ever since, because it feels like an honest picture of what following Jesus has looked like in my own life.
When Jesus calls us to go deeper—not just to believe, but to actually follow, to let Him into the parts of our life that are still piled up and out of order—it’s not a quick process. I think sometimes we expect that kind of transformation to feel dramatic, like a single moment where everything gets sorted at once. But when I look at the actual shape of my life over the past two years, what I see is more like that Easter aisle. One section. One shelf. One small clearing at a time.
I trusted God before. I knew the words. I could talk about faith and mean it. But the faith I’m living now is being tested in ways that the earlier version of me couldn’t have handled, because it was built for questions that weren’t as hard. Following Jesus has done something I didn’t fully expect: it has kept showing me more of the mess. Every section cleared opens a view to the next one. And the invitation keeps coming—not as a rebuke, but as something closer to what the women heard at the tomb. Come and see. This is what’s actually here.
What I’ve learned is that the question “where do I begin?” is not a sign that the task is too big. It’s the beginning of the work itself. The women didn’t have an answer to the stone problem. They went anyway. And when they looked up, the stone was already gone.
I look back at where I started and I’m honestly a little amazed. Not because I’ve arrived anywhere, but because the cleaning that has occurred—the slow, section-by-section, shelf-by-shelf work of becoming someone who actually trusts God at a deeper level—is real. I can see it. And that matters on the mornings when I’m standing in the middle of the next mess, wondering once again where to begin.
• • •
For Reflection
Where is Jesus currently inviting you to “come and see”—to step into something that feels unresolved or unfinished? What is one small section you could begin clearing today?
