What do you think about to get through the dark times?

What Keeps You Going When Everything Falls Apart

There's a question that surfaces when life gets properly difficult. Not the everyday inconveniences, but the moments that knock the ground out from under you. The diagnosis. The betrayal. The loss that doesn't make sense.

The question is simple: what do you think about to get through?

Some people think about their kids. Others think about the people counting on them. Some just put their heads down and push through because they don't know what else to do. But what about Jesus? In the darkest hours of his life, what was going through his mind?

The answer, according to the book of Hebrews, is genuinely surprising.

The Joy That Makes No Sense

Hebrews 12:2 puts it like this: "Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame."

Joy. In the middle of a crucifixion. That doesn't compute on any normal scale of human experience.

The talk explored this apparent contradiction head-on. Jesus was heading to the most brutal form of execution the Roman Empire had devised. He endured it. He despised the shame of it. Those are real, raw, awful emotions. And yet the writer of Hebrews says he got through it because of joy.

"As odd as it sounds, despite the pain and the emotions, he found joy in the midst of all of this darkness."

So what was the joy? It was people. It was humanity. It was you and me.

"You and I are what got Jesus through the dark. Imagine that. As he is going through this whole affair, he gets through it by thinking of you and of me. That should tell you something right there of the value that God places on mankind."

The Road to Golgotha

The talk walked through the crucifixion narrative from Mark's Gospel, combining accounts from the different Gospels to build a fuller picture.

The soldiers took Jesus into the palace and called together the entire brigade. They dressed him in purple, pressed a crown of thorns onto his head, and began mocking him. "Bravo, king of the Jews." They hit him, spat on him, and knelt in mock worship.

The language in the talk was direct: "These soldiers, spurring one another on to abuse somebody who has no ability to fight back, they're cowards. We'd call them bullies, plain and simple."

There was a personal reflection here that felt real rather than rehearsed: "When I was a kid I used to get bullied a fair amount. I had ginger hair, national health glasses which were glasses supplied by the government free of charge that were devoid of any kind of design aesthetic, I had asthma, so I wasn't strong and I wasn't sporty. I basically had all the characteristics of someone who would get bullied, and I did."

That vulnerability did something important. It connected the ancient story to lived experience. Bullying didn't stop two thousand years ago. It's still happening, and the same cowardice drives it.

The Moment That Changed a Film Director

On the way to Golgotha, the soldiers forced a man called Simon from Cyrene to carry the cross. At the execution site, they offered Jesus wine mixed with myrrh as a mild painkiller. He refused it.

Then they nailed him to the cross.

The talk referenced Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, and specifically the scene where the nails are hammered in. Gibson chose to do a cameo in that scene. Not as a face on screen, but as the hands holding the hammer.

"When asked why he chose that particular scene, he simply said: it was me that put him on the cross. It was my sins that put him there."

The talk extended this: "It wasn't the Romans nailing Christ to the cross. It was us. It could have just as easily been my hands with that hammer and nail."

And here's the part that is almost impossible to hold together in your mind: "The very people nailing him to the cross, he gets through it by thinking of them."

Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing."

The Response Nobody Expected

A contributor to the service reflected on that prayer with real honesty: "When I think about this passage, I try to imagine what I would have done in his place, what prayer I might have prayed. And I certainly can't imagine praying what Jesus prayed. In his probably his darkest moment, his moment of agony and distress and suffering, he asks God to forgive the people that have done this to him."

That response defies every natural human instinct. In a moment of profound injustice, the expected response is anger, bitterness, a cry for vengeance. Instead, there's forgiveness. Offered freely. Offered to the people who are actively causing the suffering.

This isn't presented as something we should find easy to replicate. It's presented as something worth noticing. Because it reveals something about the character of the person on the cross that goes beyond normal categories of good or inspiring.

The Darkness and the Cry

The narrative continued through the hours on the cross. Passers-by hurled insults. The religious leaders mocked him. Even the criminals crucified beside him joined in.

At noon, darkness covered the whole land until three in the afternoon. And then came the cry that has echoed through twenty centuries: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

That cry is significant because it's a quotation from Psalm 22, which begins in despair but ends in trust. Jesus wasn't abandoning his faith. He was entering fully into the experience of human suffering, including the feeling of God's absence, which is often the hardest part of any dark time.

What This Means for Your Dark Moments

The talk connected all of this back to the opening question. What do you think about to get through the dark times?

"The thing about the last few weeks of our journey through Mark's Gospel has been hard-hitting. The betrayal, the injustice, the greed of humanity. The Bible really gets into the hard stuff."

There was no attempt to minimise suffering or offer a cheerful platitude. Instead, the invitation was to consider a different framework for endurance. Not gritting your teeth and pushing through. Not pretending things are fine. But finding something, or someone, worth enduring for.

Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him. That joy was relational. It was about people, about connection, about the hope of restored relationship between God and humanity.

A Question for the Hard Days

If you're in a difficult season, this passage doesn't promise a quick fix. It doesn't even promise that the difficulty will make sense while you're in it.

But it does offer this: the idea that you might be more valued than you realise. That the God who endured the worst humanity could throw at him did so while thinking about you. Not as an abstract concept, but as the specific reason he kept going.

What would it change if you believed that? And on the days when everything feels dark, what is the joy set before you that might help you endure?