Awakening...

Today I feel overwhelmed by all that is before us. 

It was an easy task to shut things down, it is becoming apparent that reopening will require a lot of work, planning, preparation, and a near total embrace of ambiguity as no one seems to know what exactly needs to be done. In other words, it was fairly easy to lock everything down, it will be altogether different opening everything back up.

That strikes me—we lock things down—but we open things up…

The coronavirus confines us. It severely curtails what we can do. It limits where we can be. It sets parameters on how many of us need to be in any given place. All of that, in turn, brings us down—we are not happy; we are not settled; and we are increasingly despondent. 

Opening back up feels like a human reassertion of control. It feels like a rebellious thumb in the nose of everything that keeps us locked away. It is an assertion of self. It is a statement of power. It is an uplifting of all that makes human—the image of God within creation.

But looking at the two above paragraphs immediately stands as a reminder and caution that it could all be illusory—the uplift, not the downturn. 

Are we really in control?

Poke a bully and you might get hit.

Self-assertion tends to go badly, if the scriptural witness is accurate.

How much power do we really have in the face of contagion?

All of those questions reveal how fleeting our uplift might be. 

One of the inescapables is that in the face of our current plague, we really are at its mercy. I am sure that one day, we will develop a vaccine, our doctors will understand it, and we will be able to curtail its devastating effects. But not yet. More people fall ill every day. More people die each day. Places that have made forays back toward normalcy are seeing recurrences. These microbes really are powerful. To say otherwise—to deny their power—is a foolhardy at best, a path to doom at worst. 

But God is good and grace abounds.

If we will accept reality, altered as it is, we are actually allowing ourselves the space and time to find an exit. God sparks our imagination. Scripture is the record of how that works as person after person finds resolution to their conundrums—none of the 100 laments in the psalms ends in abject despair (and some of them are truly dark and desolate); David, Moses, the disciples, Mary, Deborah, Ruth, and Esther all found ways out of potential desolations. But it took time. It took reflection, meditation, and prayer. It took accepting things as they are to find a way to transcend and transform them in moments of redemption. 

I pray we will be patient. The morning comes…