Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Blessings are sure!
Deuteronomy 2:7
Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.’
2 Corinthians 6:410
As servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities… , yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
Words of Grace For Today
The Covid 19 emergency measures in place in nearly every corner of the world, some tighter than elsewhere, wear on us. We are hardwired to connect with others.
My niece went to the beach in Costa Rica where she lives. The authorities arrived and ordered her to return home. She did. Another beach goer received the same ordered and dallied, to be arrested and placed in their ‘police wagon.’
In Canada we are emptying the jails for there is no real protection there should Covid 19 reach inside those walls. Cleaning solutions are most often water and toilet paper, or a rag from an old towel, if you are lucky. The regular issue of cleaning solution is controlled by the inmates and is little more than water in its effectiveness. Instead of jail, heavy fines are in place for breaching emergency orders.
Through this wilderness of working diligently to avoid a deadly microscopic enemy, how can we trust that God is with us? Our success in avoiding the deadly enemy depends less on what we ourselves do and more on what a whole host of others do! We are in this together, dependent on what the most reckless person among us does!
The real enemy though is not this tiny one that can kill us, nor the sloppy ignorance and apathy of others. The real enemy is our own fear. For fear will make us sloppy, reckless and contagious hosts carrying the tiny enemy about for days before we show signs of being infected.
Fear also knocks the life right out of us, so that even if we never come close to, or even if we survive being infected, and nearly drowning in our own body fluids filling our lungs fighting against this tiny enemy …. Fear reduces life now and after Covid 19 to something so much less than life as God intended and made us able to live.
Fear, panic, and especially irrational terror cut off our thought processes so that we no longer can carefully assess what is happening. Our responses are quick, but often more destructive than the focus of our fear or panic. Irrational terror does not wait for an object of fear to come along our paths. It creates imaginary objects of fear. The wilderness we jump down into is a dark hole which can consume us, or transform us into a devil’s dervish of destruction to others around us.
Paul’s words need to be ours: we have commended ourselves to Christ, no matter our circumstances: no matter the cause for real fear, we remain courageously faithful and loving for others. No matter our riches or our poverty, we remain thankful and generous. No matter the enemies we face, we remain joyous, for Christ gives us life that is not diminished by outward or inward events. Our lives as God-made saints remain intact, even if the universe collapses in on itself.
Surely, then, we have solid reason to be Christ’s voice, hands and feet in these times!