This First-of-a-Kind Easter Observance

As this first-of-a-kind Easter observance for Doug and me was ending, I started watching a YouTube doctor explain how COVID-19 kills us, having just heard the weather forecast for our area for the next 24 hours.

As I felt my breathing become shallower, I urged myself to turn the computer off, and get to bed. (There, I could wait in comfort for the forecasted tornadic weather to rearrange my life.)

Seriously!

Was I not paying attention to the wealth of sound preaching, teaching, and worship freely available all day?

Yes I was; I did . . . I believe God, and in His kindness in giving Christ. It’s just that many more times during the day and night, this faith feels like the proverbial rubber meeting the road.

I don’t need to know how COVID-19 kills. Nor, do I need to know when storms might obliterate the remnants of me. I need to know if my faith’s traction – especially on unfamiliar roads to an uncertain future — will hold!

I’ve never celebrated an Easter when times were as alarming, and I felt so . . . vulnerable and powerless to protect any body else.

Maybe that was the real point of this year’s first-of-a-kind Easter observance : coming to understand in a fresh way: It’s not my faith that will hold; it is its object!

The whole world may finally understand what it is like to be in the same boat. Some of us have spotted leaks, and we agree we need leaders and a plan. But we aren’t all singing of the same page. Meanwhile, as people are dying, nature is revving up her storms, and unleashing more locust, while the world’s economies contract.

Talk about intractable troubles!

Years ago, Diane Mandt Langberg’s suggestion to counselors facing intractable troubles made good sense when the politics about social policy was all I had to worry about (This Time Last Year and The Morning News)

Perhaps all the craziness and cruelty looms, not because God expects me to fix the brokenness. Or, that He wants my opinions about it. “Is it possible that God has called us . . . so that we might pray,” Dr. Langberg asks?

“Our intercession can cover far more people and situations than we can ever help in the literal sense . . . It is in the process of interceding that God’s purpose and wise order is brought about in this world. ” (In Our Lives First: Meditations for Counselors, p.13, 14)

We have been praying through the guide, Thirty Days of Prayer for the Church, The Nation and the World, and I commend it as the news isn’t necessarily going to be what any of us wants to hear.

Here’s where the recently quoted snippet from C.S. Lewis helps: “Pull yourself together . . . [bombs] may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” C.S. Lewis and the Coronavirus