Are any of the rest of you tired of thinking about viruses and germs?
I am not a germaphobe by any stretch of the imagination. I rarely think about the material things of this world that we cannot see with the naked eye, but this whole pandemic has caused me to think about things I have never spent any significant time musing on. I think about every. single. thing. I touch. Especially if I have to leave the house. Every. Single. Thing. And y'all? I never once before thought about how many times a day I touch my face! (It's a lot.) All this thinking on the "unseen" has me thinking about spiritually unseen things as well, so I thought I'd spend a little of my shelter-at-home time sharing a couple of random thoughts.
1. Our unseen enemy. It is so easy for us to find people to blame for all our problems in this world. Shaming and casting blame are among the easiest things for us to do when we begin to feel like life has been unfair or unjust. Let me find a person or a people group to blame for this bad thing that's happened and scream that out to the world. That'll fix it! In Ephesians, Paul tells us, "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms". To be sure, those spiritual forces work in and through people at times, but the people are the symptom, not the disease. But gosh, it's so much easier to blame a person, isn't it? Battling a person rarely brings any lasting, systemic change. If we don't get to the root, we're just constantly putting out fires, without stopping to figure out why the fires keep raging.
I'm seeing this dynamic played out in the COVID crisis. We cannot see our enemy. It's microscopic. For sure, the battle must be waged on a macro scale - stay home, wash your hands, don't touch anything you don't have to when you do have to go out, etc., but the real battle is against this unseen enemy. We're not staying home from work or school, we're not rearranging our lives, we're not forsaking in-person time with people we love because of anything we can see. We must always keep at the forefront who the enemy in this battle is, or we'll be tempted to have big gatherings, or skip sanitizing surfaces, or washing hands diligently - after all, we look clean - we feel clean - we don't feel sick or we're not in the high risk groups. Doing it this way is no fun, we're losing money, we're bored, we're lonely. It would be easier to think that we can just go about our everyday, normal lives and just treat the sick as they come up -- but that scenario will quickly bring about more destruction than any of us want to imagine. Who is the enemy here? We can't see this enemy without looking deeply - at least not it until it's too late. We have to choose tactics that go to war with the actual enemy, not the perceived one, or we. will. lose.
So if we can learn something from this season that will last after this crisis is gone, may one of those things be that we need remember who the actual enemy is and choose strategies that work against that enemy, rather than choosing the easy way of lobbing shame and blame at each other. May it be that when we see problems, when we see people hurting, dying, treated unjustly, that rather than choosing to simply take on each individual instance (which is still important - just as treating the sick in this crisis is), we need to back up and look at what's happening under the surface that's causing the hate and injustice to spread and deal with THAT. Strategies that deal with the root may take longer, may require more of us, may be inconvenient, but this is where real, lasting change will take place.
2. We're all in this together - whether we like it or not. One of our favorite ways to describe the Church is as a Body - how all the parts are interconnected, that losing any of those parts will hurt all the parts. Sometimes I don't think we really believe it though. Even with our own physical bodies, we definitely value some parts as better than others, some parts as more worthy, some parts as easier to live without.
When I look at how this virus grows and spreads and the drastic steps that we are being asked to take to stop it - it paints such a clear picture to me of how the Church might actually work. As medical and scientific experts have tried to explain to us in laymen's terms how to "flatten the curve" and get this virus under control, it becomes increasingly more clear how important it is that EVERYONE MATTERS. If most of us stay home, if most of us wash our hands, if most of us stop going everywhere we normally would - it will help, yes. But when one person decides they're above the laws of nature and they don't have to - they hurt the rest of us. All of us are hurt when one person decides they don't need to be careful, don't need to watch what they touch or where they go or who they're around. We don't have the luxury of "every man is an island" in this scenario. We are interconnected whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not. For the whole to be healthy, every single individual part matters. We can opt out - but we are hurting potentially thousands of others when we do.
Let's find a way to transfer this new way of life to the spiritual: For sure and certain, there is disease in the Church. We need to face that fact and get serious about rooting it out. If you're in a Church that is harmful or abusive, speak out about it - be a part of cutting out the disease, leave and find a healthy place to be. But please don't let that be the reason you give up. The rest of us need you. And you need us. Every single one of us matter.
When I wash my hands for 20 seconds so many times a day, it feels like no one else benefits, but in truth, potentially hundreds do. If I could see my value within the Body of Christ with the same weight that I assign to washing my hands during this crisis, what kind of difference would it make? If I saw the value of my small investments in my faith community as being as valuable as I see choosing to stay home rather than going to that party down the street, what impact could I have? How much healthier would our church communities be? How much healthier would the worldwide church be? If I can stop thinking of Church as all the different ways it asks things of me that are sometimes hard, or interruptions to my routine or keeping me from watching all my shows on Netflix or asking me to give up something I'm used to and comfortable with, and instead think of the value that my investment gives others and the value that another person's investment is giving to me - what kind of difference would that make? When we continue to think we can Lone Ranger our Christian journey, we are hurting others - others that need the interconnectedness of this Body to thrive. Whether we want to admit it or not, whether we like it or not - we are connected to other another. Your choices effect me. My choices effect you.
When I can grasp that the small things I'm willing to sacrifice for the good of the other can actually change the world, the world will actually change, right?
So --
Wash your hands.
Stay home.
Fight the actual enemy, rather than the easy target.
Invest in what benefits the whole.
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What are you learning during this season?
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