Life has changed.
Circumstances way out of our control have completely upset the normal
order of life, and we hate it. Not surprisingly
our response has been fear, blame, hoarding, and escaping to our homes hoping
the monster doesn’t get us. In many ways, it feels like one of those dystopia movies I grew up on. The confusing part is that Jesus was never featured
in any of those movies, so we are ill-prepared to be Christians in such a
time. Or are we?
What has been demonstrated very clearly is that our way of
life was balanced on a knife-edge, and we have fallen off the knife. That way of life revolved around a greed-based
economy, so the collapse of this economy is forcing us to question how much of
the stuff in our lives is really necessary.
Jesus’ teaching was that life should be based on meeting needs of ourselves,
and of others with grace and generosity.
This has always been hard to live out in a culture of selfishness.
The interweb is providing a plethora of voices the means to
clamor for our attention. The opinions
coming from these voices are varied, contradictory and confusing. Common questions and opinions include:
Who is to blame?
American culture is litigious. When someone does something bad – they get sued.
And so we are scrambling to figure out
who to blame and who should pay. For
some, the answer is to blame political authorities for a lack of planning. The language is passionate, angry and
condemnatory. For others, the blame belongs
to the nations where the disease initially flourished, and so all oriental looking
people are subjected to verbal and physical abuse, regardless of where they are
from. Then it gets to be local. Neighbors condemn neighbors because they are
not perceived to be complying with current norms. Shaming and shunning fly around facebook pages. We express our fear with rage.
When will it end?
I recently had major surgery. It took weeks to recover, indeed it is now 7
weeks and I am still not fully healed. Initially
I could not wait to get out of bed and back to normal, and it was galling and
depressing to learn that my body is older, less forgiving, and more prone to
pain than before. This is the new normal;
it will never go back to the way it was.
So it is with this virus.
It is likely that our lives will never go back to “normal” and maybe
that is good. Was anyone fully satisfied
or fulfilled by life as it was?
History has shown that crises can completely change the way
that nations think. In this case, the
whole world is affected. Could good come
of this?
When will it end?
When will I go back to my office?
No-one knows. Experts pontificate
and modelers crunch numbers. The catch
is that all models are only as good as the assumptions made and the data
provided. My students love to develop
artificial neural network models to predict the engineering performance of the
materials we study in our lab, but it is scary how often they are unable to tie
those models to basic physics and chemistry.
It would seem we do not have enough data to make predictions with any
reliability.
What about God?
If he is really God, then what is he up to? If he is truly omnipotent, he could fix this
with a snap of his fingers. How can a
good God do this to us? He is the one to
blame!
So where is God in all of this? The first point to remember is that neither
creation, life, nor the economy are about us.
We were created to worship the creator.
When we wander into self-indulgence and self-glorification, God gets
jealous that our attention is not on him, and, in his own time, he takes
measures to get it back. And yes, God is
absolutely justified in getting jealous.
He is sovereign, almighty, above all else, and deserves to be worshiped.
Has God been caught out by this pandemic? Is he surprised? Nope.
He knows everything. Therefore,
is he doing this to punish us? In the
same way that my parents inflicted pain on me as a kid when I was disobedient,
God is using pain to draw him back into the top of our priorities. My parents were not being mean, but loving,
by teaching me what is good and right, and sometimes it hurt to learn those
lessons. Discipline rather than
punishment.
So how do we handle the promises of good all over the Bible
when, evidently, they are not being fulfilled for everyone? Many people are suffering and dying, losing jobs,
and trapped indoors. In many ways, it
feels like God has gone silent. The only
way I can speak to this is to refer to Job and Joseph. Both went through a really bad time, and God
seemed to be silent. Yet in both cases, God
was working out his intent. It was
pointed out to me recently that when Joseph finally revealed himself to his
brothers, he did not claim that God made something good out of something bad
(making lemonade in modern parlance). Rather,
he planned the good from the start, and was present with Joseph’s suffering on
the journey to it.
How do we apply that to where we are now? Remember that God’s horizon is longer than
ours, and trust that his intentions are good.
His definition of what is good may differ from ours; for me, good is
comfort and security for my body. For
God, good is eternal security for my soul.
Faith vs Science?
Will Christians get special treatment? Does God's work in their lives mean they are
protected from this disease? Should we
defy local laws and go to church? On the
basis that, normally, God does not stop us from falling off ladders, or heal
all of us from other diseases, then it would seem fair to answer that question
with a “No”. Now He may perform some miracles, but we are reminded not to test
him. The purpose of miracles is to glorify Him, and never to exult any person.
So how do we respond?
We trust God with the things we cannot control. We act wisely with the things we can control,
including listening to people who know more about this than we do, and
filtering out truth from ranting. Above
all, we love and support the people we can reach.
What about this concept of social distancing? Let’s instead call it what it is – physical
distancing. I have had more social
contact with people than ever, actively caring for 6 different groups of
people, and yet I have not seen any of them in weeks. In times of uncertainty and fear, believers
have the greatest chance to display Christ’s love because we are secure in
him. We need to speak up about love, joy
peace found in Christ.
We need to step forward and proclaim the gospel to a
frightened world…
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