“Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie took to an Easter message to express her thoughts on faith, doubt, and uncertainty, as her mother, Nancy Guthrie, has been missing for 63 days.
During an online Easter service hosted by Good Shepherd New York on YouTube, Guthrie shared a heartfelt reflection on coping with grief and the challenges of lingering questions during what she called a difficult period.
On February 1, Nancy Guthrie, aged 84, was last seen after allegedly being taken from her bedroom in northern Tucson, Arizona, around 2 a.m. Police discovered a faint trail of blood droplets stretching from the front door to the edge of the driveway. Her home’s back doors were left ajar, and a doorbell camera had been removed.
Later, investigators found home security footage capturing an unidentified masked man at the doorstep. The trail of evidence seemed to vanish at the driveway, leaving her whereabouts a mystery.
Savannah Guthrie delivered a moving Easter message about dealing with faith and uncertainty amid the ongoing search for her missing 84-year-old mother. (Good Shepherd New York YouTube)
Guthrie admitted that while Easter symbolizes hope and renewal, these themes feel remote as she grapples with the ambiguity surrounding her mother’s disappearance.
“There are moments in which that promise seems irretrievably far away, when life itself seems far harder than death,” Guthrie said. “These moments of deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment.”
Guthrie said that in her recent “season of trial,” she questioned whether Jesus experienced the same kind of uncertainty she now feels, particularly the pain of not knowing what comes next or why suffering is unfolding.
Savannah Guthrie poses alongside her mother Nancy Guthrie during a production break whilst hosting NBC’s “Today Show” live from Australia. (Don Arnold/WireImage)
“I have wondered – I have questioned – whether Jesus really ever experienced this particular wound that I feel, this grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld,” she said. “In those darkest moments I have thought, bitterly and perhaps irreverently, that I have stumbled upon a feeling that Jesus did not know.”
She said her perspective began to shift as she reflected on the period between the crucifixion and resurrection, a span she described as often overlooked but central to understanding faith in moments of uncertainty.
“After Jesus died, after he breathed his last, what did he actually know?” Guthrie said. “Did he think his time in the grave would be a day or two or a thousand years? In the grave, does his agony seem indefinite to him? That torment of uncertainty? The way indefinite pain can feel eternal? Perhaps he did know this feeling after all.”
Savannah Guthrie visits the Today show at Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Thursday, March 5, 2026. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Guthrie said that realization helped her reframe her own experience, describing life as existing in a kind of “meantime” — a period marked by waiting, unanswered questions and the absence of clear resolution.
She said that in those moments, people can feel unsure, lost, abandoned, disappointed and forgotten, even as faith calls them to trust in a future they cannot yet see.
Despite that struggle, Guthrie said her faith remains rooted in the belief that God is present even without immediate answers, offering comfort not through certainty, but through presence.
“It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindingly beautiful,” Guthrie said. “It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed.”
“So I close my eyes this morning and I feel the sunshine,” she continued. “I see a bright vision of the day when heaven and earth pass away because they are one on earth as it is in heaven.”
“When we celebrate today, this is what we celebrate, and I celebrate, too,” she said. “I still believe. And so I say with conviction, happy Easter.”
