Good Friday is like last night’s mindful hot yoga class.

It was my first, so I had gone with some trepidation.

I hadn’t known what to wear, for one thing, so I put on my only pair of light Spandex, which happen to be a shiny, bright, royal blue. A Christmas gift from hubby several years back that I now rarely wear.

And the hygiene of stretching and sweating profusely in 100-plus-degree temperatures on borrowed mats circulated and re-circulated among strangers had convinced me I needed my own mat, thankfully only $7.99 at Ross.

Then I had endured the looks of tattooed hipsters and bar goers at $5 margarita happy hour as I walked—now briskly—down the main drag of East Atlanta, until I came to the window of “Sacred Sweat Yoga.”

A small sign on the door told me to go around back and knock, which I did to no avail.

When I returned to the front door, I peeked inside to see two neat, long rows of stretching bodies calmly ensconced in their work-out, the first of those bodies maybe two feet from the front window where I stood.

I was ten minutes late.

So I knocked and rang the door bell and tried to open the front door. To no avail.

The outside happy hour crowd next door saw my plight and tried to help. One went and banged louder on the front door. No luck. She returned to her margarita with sympathetic expressions, and we all enjoyed a good laugh as the rain began to fall and the heavens broke loose in peals of thunder. A margarita was starting to look more enjoyable than a hot yoga work-out, anyway.

The truth is, those ladies in hot yoga weren’t being intentionally rude. They just really hadn’t noticed me knocking on the door and peeking in under the hanging blinds. They were so mindful of their hot yoga moves that they hadn’t eyes to see anything else.

Good Friday is a bit like that: it slips imperceptibly by for many of us, despite the big hint that something remarkable has happened. Maybe the most poignant thing about Good Friday is that when God dies, not many really notice. Do they care? Maybe they would if they noticed.

In this sense, I am guessing most of us are not unlike those in Jesus’ time. Sure, for the disciples and maybe for a few who stand watching at the foot of the cross, like the centurion, Jesus’ death means something profound and life-changing has just taken place. Their world will never be the same again, precisely because Jesus’ death means a coming undone of hope itself. But a large proportion of people in Jesus’ time probably would not have noticed. They would have gone on living without noticing that in Jesus and in his death God had been knocking on their door and peeking under the blinds.

Today is Good Friday, which means God went to a cross and died. I try to wrap my mind around that and fail. But today it is enough of a distraction to make me want to live like I’m worth dying for.

You are, too.