We’ve reached one of my favorite times of year.

I don’t mean in the church calendar, although I love the season of Easter as much as the next guy. (Did you know that it’s a season, fifty days long? There are even daily Easter devotionals, just like in Lent! You can sign up for one here.)

I don’t mean in the changing seasons; I do love this springtime warmth, although I have to admit that my eyes have been burning from ragweed all week long.

No, I mean something else. We’ve reached one of my favorite times of year: BAA jacket week.

It’s not so much the Marathon itself that I love about this week, although watching the astounding performance of world-class runners is fun. It’s not the vague feeling of regret I feel every year, never having run a marathon, and finding myself thinking yet again that maybe next year I will. No, it’s the fact that for this one week of the year, I almost literally can’t walk down the street without seeing someone half-limping down the sidewalk, proudly wearing the official Boston Athletic Association windbreaker they earned by running in this year’s marathon. And every time I see them I say congratulations, or give them directions, or just smile to myself. You’ve done a hard thing, I think to myself. Well done.

Not everyone is cut out for running a marathon. (Like I said, I never have.) But every one of you reading this has, I know, done a hard thing, and nobody has given you a jacket, and people may or may not have said, “Well done.”

I don’t know what it was, or when it was, or if it’s even over yet. Maybe you’re still somewhere on Heartbreak Hill. But every one of you has done a hard thing in your life, and here you are. Whatever it was, you endured it, or you are enduring, or you can’t imagine that you could ever endure it, but here you are. You’ve earned your jacket. And when I see you, I know, and I say to you (in my head—I’m not this weird), “Well done.”

Jesus appears to his disciples after the Resurrection still bearing his wounds. He shows them the marks that have been left by what’s been done. And yet they’ve been transformed. The places of pain have become proof of the resilience of his life, and they remind his disciples and us that the power of suffering and death is never strong than the power of love and life.

You may not have visible scars. It may be that nobody’s ever given you a commemorative jacket. But I know that you’ve endured tremendous things, and come out on the other side. I know that for you, as for Jesus, the power of God’s love is stronger than anything else; that there is nothing that could ever separate you from God’s love; that when God looks at you, God sees you with eyes of compassion and love, and says, “Well done.”