Saturday

I have been to some very dark Saturdays. Not the stay-in-bed-and-watch-movies kind. The kind where something you believed in is gone, and you don’t know yet whether it’s coming back. The kind where you made a decision—or someone made one for you—and the rubble is all around you, and you can’t see the shape of what comes next.

I’ve had those days in my personal life. May 12, 2012, was one of them. My first day in rehab. You put down the thing that was destroying you, and then you sit in the wreckage it left behind. Relationships damaged. Trust broken. Years you can’t get back. There’s a morning that comes early in recovery when the fog lifts just enough to see clearly, and what you see is not pretty. That was a long Saturday.

I’ve had those days in leadership too. Initiatives that crashed. Hires that didn’t work out. Strategies that looked brilliant on paper and turned out to be expensive lessons. Relationships I handled poorly that took years to repair—if they repaired at all.

In the Easter story, Saturday is the day nobody talks about. Good Friday gets the weight. Easter Sunday gets the joy. But Saturday is just… silence. The disciples are scattered. Peter is gutted by his own cowardice. The women are grieving. Everyone who had given up everything to follow this man is sitting with the wreckage of what just happened.

They didn’t know Sunday was coming.

That’s the part that gets me every time I think about it. They couldn’t see the end of the story from inside Saturday. All they had was Friday’s verdict and Saturday’s silence. From where they were standing, it was over.

I think about how many times I’ve quit something on a Saturday.

Not literally. But I’ve walked away from a difficult conversation because it felt unresolvable. I’ve let a struggling team member go when what they needed was more of my time and attention. I’ve abandoned initiatives midway through the hard part because the resistance felt like confirmation that it wasn’t going to work. I’ve written off relationships because the silence felt final.

What if I was wrong about the silence?

What I’ve learned, slowly and painfully, is that transformation almost always looks like failure before it looks like anything else. The chrysalis, before the butterfly, looks like a dead thing. The seed, before it grows, goes into the ground. Recovery, before it becomes a new life, first requires hitting a bottom that looks and feels like the end.

The same pattern shows up in organizations. The best turnarounds I’ve ever seen looked like collapses first. The best hires I’ve ever made came after stretches when we couldn’t get it right. Some of the most important cultural shifts at Kimray started as uncomfortable, resistant, messy conversations that felt like they were going nowhere.

They just needed a Sunday.

So, what do you do while you’re in the Saturday? Because you can’t skip it. You don’t get to go straight from the cross to the empty tomb. The Saturday is part of it.

You stay. That’s the first thing. You don’t make permanent decisions in the middle of temporary darkness. You resist the urge to wrap it up, call it done, and move on. Saturday is not the moment to quit the initiative, end the relationship, or write the eulogy. Saturday is the moment to be still and hold on.

You grieve honestly. The disciples didn’t pretend Friday didn’t happen. They sat with it. Pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn’t doesn’t move you through the Saturday any faster. It just means you’re carrying it alone. Leaders who can be honest about what’s hard give their teams permission to be honest too, and that honesty is actually what creates the conditions for something new.

And you stay open to Sunday. This is the hard one. Not naive, not in denial, but genuinely open to the possibility that the story isn’t over. That what looks like an ending might be a turning point. That the silence might not be the final word.

I have been to some very dark Saturdays. I have also seen Sundays that I didn’t think were coming.

Great leaders learn to hold both of those truths at the same time. They let people grieve the Friday without rushing past it. They sit in the Saturday without panicking. And they point, gently but with conviction, toward the Sunday they believe is on its way.

Hope is not wishful thinking. It is the hard-won belief, grounded in experience, that the story has more pages. And leading from that belief, even in the silence, is the Bison Way.