Lent 2026 · Day 14: Unfinished Bizsnatch, Please Hold Forever...

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I was speaking to a very lovely human tonight who told me something funny her son said: The idea of living for eternity seems like the worst idea ever (I'm paraphrasing).

Honestly, he might be onto something.

I mean, imagine having to listen to church music for eternity. That sounds awful. It's like having to listen to Christmas music all year long at the Circle K. Which is why I sometimes joke with my co-workers that hell is probably just people working at a gas station forever.

Let’s marinate on this for a bit.

What if when you die and go to heaven, you still have to pick a job to do for eternity?

Honestly, what a drag that would be.

You spend your whole material life working in one form of drudgery or another, and then you finally make it to the afterlife only to discover there’s Archangel Gabriel waiting for you with a clipboard ready to give you your work assignment.

Welcome to eternity. Please select your department.

Gas station attendant in the sky.

Heavenly attorney arguing whether someone should or shouldn’t get reincarnated. A full Defend Your Life situation.

Processing quality control paperwork for miracles.

In the show "Dead Like Me," the main character dies when a piece of space station toilet falls from orbit and hits her. Space poo.

That’s how she goes out.

And then she wakes up and discovers her new job in the afterlife is being a Grim Reaper. Honestly… that’s kind of hilarious. But it also got me thinking about how often stories about the afterlife still involve work.

One of my toxic or productive traits, depending on who you ask, is that when something is bothering me, I fixate on things. I pick a thing and obsess over it until my brain works through whatever problem it’s trying to solve in the background.

Sometimes it’s books or audiobooks.

Sometimes it’s going to the driving range and hitting hundreds of golf balls.

Sometimes it's aquariums.

Sometimes it’s reorganizing everything I own.

During the pandemic the thing I fixated on was K-dramas.

So many K-dramas.

An unreasonable amount of K-dramas.

And when I look back now, I’m pretty sure my brain was trying to work something out while I was watching them. It does that sometimes. Picks something harmless to stare at while the real issue sorts itself out, constantly rattling around in my brain.

At the time, what I was probably working through was my grief.

One of the shows I watched during that time I really loved was "Hotel Del Luna." The cinematography is stunning and the fashion is beautiful. The premise is simple but kind of brilliant.

There’s a hotel that only spirits can see. The guests are people who have died but can’t move on yet because they still have unfinished business from their lives. Grudges. Regrets. Apologies that were never made.

The woman who runs the hotel has been stuck doing that job for almost a thousand years as punishment for a massive sin she committed long ago.

So she spends centuries helping dead people resolve the things they couldn’t let go of.

But here’s the important part. She can’t run the hotel alone. She needs a human manager. Someone who is still alive to help deal with the parts of unfinished business that still involve the living.

Because sometimes the only way someone can move on is if something gets resolved back in the world they left behind.

Each episode is another story about someone trying to settle something that was left unfinished.

A grudge.

A betrayal.

A love that was never expressed.

An apology that never happened.

And the more I watched it, the more that idea gnawed at me.

The idea that people can’t move on until they deal with the things they left unresolved.

If you've been following this series I had mentioned my ex-fiancé who's a pastor.

When we broke up it wasn’t some dramatic betrayal. It was just unfortunate. One of those breakups where things are awkward but manageable at first, and then something happens that makes it difficult to ever speak again. Eventually, one of us decided the cleanest solution was no contact. It was her.

So we didn’t talk.

For eight years.

A lot can happen in eight years.

In that time she went through a divorce and lost her mother. I had also lost my mother by then.

When I heard what had happened in her life, something in me said it might be time to reach out.

Not because I expected anything to restart.

Just because there was unfinished business that I needed to address.

So I reached out. But she had to decide whether she wanted to reach the rest of the way.

And she did.

At first it was a little clunky. Two people trying to figure out how to talk again after almost a decade of silence. But eventually we found a rhythm. Not just re-friending each other on social media, but actually becoming friends again in real life.

Somewhere in those conversations I told her something that took me almost a decade to finally figure out.

I didn’t know how to grieve.

Instead of going to therapy like a normal human being and dealing with that grief, I convinced myself the reason I was so unhappy must be the relationship.

So I ended it.

Years later I finally said the thing I should have said back then.

I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to mourn. It wasn't you. It was me.

She told me something that was reminiscent of what she said to me when we were together.

“I didn’t think you were taking it very hard. You seemed fine.”

That’s the thing about grief.

Sometimes it doesn’t look like grief at all.

Sometimes it looks like someone is quietly blowing up one of the most meaningful relationships in their life because they don’t understand what’s happening inside them.

For years, I carried that with me.

What I like to call the compound interest of grief.

My father died. Then my best friend died not long after. And I didn’t know how to process any of it.

But eventually, life gives you another chance to finish the conversation.

And when it does, the work is simple.

Tell the truth.

Make the apology.

Let the other person decide what they want to do with it.

Did I think about restarting the relationship? Sure. I thought about it. But she wasn’t having any of that. And honestly, that’s fair. She had already moved on and started dating someone else. Someone, she’s still perfectly happy with.

And that’s the thing about moving on.

Sometimes crossing over into the next part of life doesn’t mean going back. Sometimes it just means finishing the unfinished business so both people can move forward.

In Hotel Del Luna, the spirits can’t move on until they settle the things tethering them to the past.

Jang Man-wol, who runs the hotel, is finally able to move on after a thousand years. Not because the betrayal that destroyed her life suddenly became okay, but because through the patience of the living dude, Gu Chan-seong, who helps run the hotel with her, she learns how to feel love again. Eventually she lets the grudge go, not because the past changed, but because it was finally time to stop carrying the pain.

Maybe that idea isn’t just about ghosts.

Maybe it’s about the work we’re supposed to do while we’re still alive.

Making amends.

Settling grudges.

Finishing the conversations we were too stubborn or too scared to have when we had the chance.

Because if you do that work now, maybe when you finally show up in heaven you won’t get assigned toilet-cleaning duty for eternity.

And honestly?

If I had to pick a job in the afterlife, helping people deal with their unfinished business doesn’t sound so bad.

At least it would keep eternity interesting.

Lenten Reflection

“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.” — Matthew 5:23–24

Lent is often described as a season of repentance, but repentance is not just about feeling sorry for things we’ve done.

It’s about repair.

Jesus makes something very clear in this passage: spiritual life is not separate from our relationships with other people. If something between us and another person is unresolved, the work of faith is not to ignore it or bury it under prayer or ritual.

The work is to go back.

To tell the truth.

To make the apology.

To finish the conversation that never happened.

Not every relationship can be restored. Sometimes people have already moved on, and that is their right. But the act of reaching out, of taking responsibility for our part, of attempting reconciliation, those things free something inside us.

Maybe that’s what moving on really is.

Not escaping the past, but finally settling the unfinished business that keeps us tied to it.

As above.

So below.

Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.