As Nancy Guthrie has been missing for more than a month, her daughter, Savannah Guthrie, who, after collapsing from grief over her mother’s supposed kidnapping, shared a message on Easter.
Savannah Guthrie joined Good Shepherd New York’s digital Easter gathering on Sunday morning to share a message of hope amid her mother’s unsolved kidnapping.
“Good morning everyone. “Happy Easter,” she says as she appears at the digital Oriental meeting of Good Shepherd New York.
“And Easter is joyful. It’s flowers and pastels and baby bunnies. It’s sunshine and joy and hope. It’s rebirth and second chances and new life and new beginnings. It’s the most important day of the year for all of us who believe, even more than the birth of Christ, more than his death.”
She continues, “His resurrection, His second birth into permanent life – that is what is most crucial for us. His resurrection and resurrection mean the same thing to us. We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death.”
“But as I stand here today, I must tell you that there are moments when that promise seems irretrievably distant, when life itself seems far more difficult than death.”
“These moments of deep disappointment in God, the feeling of utter abandonment for most of us – there will come a time in our lives when these feelings prevail.”
But in the midst of her raw reflection, Guthrie unleashed within her a breathtaking personal chaos that emerged in the aftermath of her mother’s disappearance.
She begins this by explaining that she was taught that “Jesus in his short life experienced every emotion that we humans can feel.”
But in raising a question about this faith after suffering what she describes as a “season of trial,” the TODAY anchor asks, “whether Jesus actually ever experienced this specific wound that I feel, this painful and uniquely cruel wound of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld in those darkest moments.”
Guthrie, who has been off the air for two months, will return to her morning talk show on NBC on April 6.
