Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Two important gatherings dominate the news this morning. The outcomes of both will impact the burden-laden citizens of the land of the “free and the brave.” In the Senate, a COVID-19 bipartisan committee questions the heads of the nation’s leading health organizations to hear expert prognoses of the coronavirus’ threat to the country. In the Supreme Court, arguments will be heard by the justices in the lawsuit filed against the President’s bank  demanding that it release his financial records to the congregational investigating committee.

In this period of surrealism in our country, we face two threats that have the potential to reshape life as most of us have known it. On the one hand, we face (in masks) a viral infection whose origin is still debated, whose power to infect at will remains unrestrained, for whom there is no vaccine or proven antidote, that has wrecked the economy and disrupted the social order and that seems to sneer at the efforts so far to control it, or at least lessen its destructive forces.  And at the same time that we wrestle this foe, we combat also a threat to the principles of law that have governed the nation since it was founded, one that is on the verge of turning a democracy into a dictatorship. Not since 1974 when the sitting president defied the congressional branch of the democratic government and refused to respond to lawful subpoenas has the nation seen the current attempt to pretty much do the same. Essentially claiming a president is above the law and not subject to its governance.

Only God knows the ultimate outcome of these threats to the nation; whether this is our time of reckoning or just another nail in a yet unclosed coffin. I am of the mind it is the latter simply because I believe we serve a long-suffering God who does not want us, this nation of professed Christians,  to be doomed eternally. I believe that if more of us continue to pray, wait and trust Him to do the work only He can do, in time the current health and political crises will be resolved. I don’t pretend the resolutions will take us back to “how it used to be.” I imagine a new normal when all is said and done. My hope is that within the design of that new normal, the world will better see in us the image of Christ not just in what we profess, but in what do.

On the prayer line this morning, my co-leader referenced a phrase she’d  once heard as part of her devotional on the uselessness of worry. “Worrying,” she said, “is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere.” That bit of folk wisdom is apropos to the times. Yes, with these two threats we might feel worrying is a normal response; when you don’t know which way these winds might blow, worrying that you might be blown away may seem reasonable. Surely, it’s human. But in the deep recesses of our being, we know worry is not the answer; it’s just  something to do. We who profess God and the Lord as Savior know it because we know who controls the winds, who has the solutions and designs ready to reveal in His timing, who for whom nothing is impossible and all things are possible for those who love Him. And because we know these truths, we add prayer to our rocking and trust that it will give power, not to the chair, but to us to live the faith we proclaim; A faith that says, “As long as we are under His watch, we have nothing to fear and thus nothing for which to be worried about.

Love. Joy. Peace.