Wednesday, April 8, 2020
See all that is fallen, even rotting with only a shell of bark. Remember, this too shall pass.
Psalms 51:14
Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.
John 16:20
Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.
Words of Grace For Today
The horrors of bloodshed are not part of the pandemic. That would make things even worse., as if worse is needed. We still pray for deliverance from this microscopic enemy, or those two legged animals who mindlessly, ignorantly spread it about so easily. It would be so nice to find those culprits and isolate them to put this to an end. But there is no ‘we’ or ‘them’. It is us. The latest is that asymptomatic people, like you and me (if you have no symptoms … yet), can be contagious. Turns out all our very necessary efforts to stop the spread are pretty minimal defences. Like the disease of sin, we easily cannot recognize who is already ill, though they display no signs of illness. So we need pray that we be delivered.
There is in this a great amount of mourning and weeping. First, we weep for what our defence efforts have cost us all, which is no small loss. Second, when loved ones and acquaintances succumb to this enemy, our grief seems to have no bounds.
God’s promises, always and here again, that our weeping and mourning will be turned into joy. We hold on to that promise, and it carries us forward through these difficult days.