It had all been arranged. The first ones there had found everything just as he had said, so they prepared the Passover meal, but with an undercurrent of unrest.
“These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
Is it any surprise that we consistently seem to have trouble in the world? It is, to the degree that we are thinking incorrectly about our relatively brief stay on this planet. If we think we deserve a trouble-free existence, or if such an existence is our goal, we have gotten the wrong idea about life, especially when it comes to following Jesus.
I went to the grocery store yesterday and after hearing the recommendation to cover your face coming from a number of different sources, I tried to wear a scarf. If we had listened to our son Chandler, we would have been much more prepared for this. He wanted us to order masks some time ago and we just got around to doing it last week. Our first order was supposed to be here this week, but it got lost, so the next batch might get here by the end of May if at all. Fortunately, our friend, Patti, is sending us some cloth masks she is making that should arrive today. That will be great because the scarf thing just isn’t working. It keeps slipping off my nose and I have to keep pulling it up — something I’m not supposed to do because that contaminates my hands and then I can’t avoid touching my face when I pull it up.
We’ve never been through anything like this before. This pandemic is testing our faith, our stamina, our patience, our confidence, our endurance, and what I’m especially thinking about this morning — our love. There appear to be no guarantees. You never know who and when it will hit, and should it hit close to home, there’s no real way of knowing where it came from. It’s an invisible enemy and we feel helpless against it. We are all feeling our mortality as never before.
I guess 1990 something.
One of the down sides of this pandemic that is affecting us all is the fact that we are all being forced into isolation. That might not necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that we are already too isolated as individuals in society. It’s a part of our social fabric. We keep to ourselves. We share very little. We already pass each other too often as ships in the night.
Question for those of you who are now working out of your home: Are you having a hard time staying focused on your work? The distractions are killing me. Yesterday I got the Catch out at 5:15 p.m., forty-five minutes before our evening Bible Study started. I’m not excusing myself here, I’m just reporting what happened.
Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. Ephesians 4:3-6
This is a time to focus on what unites us, not what divides us, and when we are spread out all over the world, these are the things we share in common.
This is really pretty simple…
Scientists have discovered that in photographing a black hole, which we can now do, it is possible to glimpse the entire universe bent into bands around it. Here on our tiny little planet earth, a black hole of despair has gripped our hearts in the form of a novel virus that is breaking out all over the world, and no one has any immunity against it. Yet around this black hole are bands of hope and glimpses of the kingdom of God that is greater than death and disease.
I scored twelve rolls of toilet paper yesterday morning. I was so happy. I had to go to two stores before 8am on a Sunday to find it, but I did. It’s a good thing because I refused to stockpile toilet paper and we were down to our last roll. I still believe this was an artificially-created self-inflicted shortage based on fear that we would run out, and, sure enough, we did. Like the herd instinct that set in when Jesus sent a large number of swine running off a cliff and drowning in the Sea of Galilee, people were just following those in from of them. And by the time thousands of people had run off with two and three shopping carts full of toilet paper, guess what? We had a shortage.
“Virus cases mount at a grim and worrying pace,” “Day-care system suffers as virus runs roughshod,” “State rules hobble would-be nurses,” “Grim forecast in Silicon Valley,” “County leaders at odds in a time of crisis,” “Experts say growth rate could swamp hospitals” … Shall I go on? Just a few of today’s headlines from one section of the paper. It’s enough to make you want to go back to bed. Read further and you start to get into finger-pointing and “I told you so” theories of who’s responsible. Then you get into cover-up, denials, false hopes and anybody’s guess as to how long it will be before things return to normal.
John Fischer The Catch 