Today is a big day, one I look forward to for months. You are reading this a day or more later, and I really I hope I'm feeling as happy and hopeful as I am now as I write this.

Today, the Chicago Cubs take the field for the first time in 2026, and I have been (not so) patiently waiting for this day since last October.

There is something about Opening Day that I cannot explain to people who don't feel it. Every team starts at zero. Every hope is still intact. Nobody has been eliminated. Nobody has choked in the eighth inning yet. For one shining moment, the Cubs are in first place, and anything is possible, and I believe.

I have believed this my entire life. I have also watched the Cubs break my heart in ways both spectacular and mundane. I have learned not to trust a lead in September. I have learned that the baseball gods are capricious and occasionally cruel. And I show up anyway, every spring, with a heart full of hope. This could be the year...

As I join a crowd of millions of optimistic baseball fans today, I have also been writing about another optimistic crowd, one that gathered on a road into Jerusalem two thousand plus years ago. They spread their cloaks on the ground. They waved branches. They shouted. They had been waiting generations for this moment. They believed their waiting was about to be fulfilled.

They also had no idea what the week would hold.

This crowd points us toward a love that surpasses anything finite. What unfolds in Jerusalem this week is not a story I return to because I'm a fan. It's the story that holds my life, my death, and every moment between and beyond.

Holy Week asks us to walk into it with our eyes open, knowing it gets hard before it gets holy, and to keep walking anyway; to let ourselves feel the crowd's joy on Sunday, the weight of Thursday, the darkness of Friday, the emptiness of Saturday, all the while trusting that we are not the first people to have loved something that cost everything.

The invitation of Holy Week has never been to understand it fully before you enter it. It has always been simply to come, and to let it do what it does.

Sometimes the weight of Thursday, the darkness of Friday, and the emptiness of Saturday come to us in other seasons, when loss arrives uninvited, or hope has worn thin, or we are carrying something too heavy to name. The story does not flinch from those moments. It walks straight into them.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is the particular courage it takes to hope out loud, even when experience has taught you better, because that is where the truest things live. Whatever you carry into this week, you don't carry it alone. The one who walked into Jerusalem knowing what was coming still walks, still holds, and still speaks life into every darkness. And stay the course, Reader, because Sunday is not a rumor. It is a promise. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa