You can call the Governors office if you need to, but I am a big softie and seeing my kids cry over the world they are facing breaks me.
And I have heard so many different opinions about what is and isn't safe, what we should and shouldn't do, that it has become so confusing and cumbersome that I kinda just make up my own mind. Whether or not it is the best choice, I am taking and choosing what is the most convenient for me to currently listen to.....
It is probably not far from the mark to assume that for a lot of us one of the significant ways we are experiencing frustration and stress is that no one is following the rules in the same way that you are following the rules. And if those idiots keep doing things the "wrong" way it will clearly make everything worse for the rest of us. But even as we feel that way about others, we are just gathering around ourselves the voices that tell us what we want to hear anyways.
When there is no unity as a culture, a community, a neighborhood, or a family when it comes to who we listen to the results will always be destructive.
In the book of Judges we see over and over that Israel is blessed by God and then in a blink of an eye they forget God and do whatever they want. And things crash and burn pretty fast. The book even ends with the line,
"In those days Israel had no king, everyone did as he saw fit"(Judges 21:25).
This wasn't a statement that Israel did not have a human king and if they had one things would smooth out, but it was a reflection that they refused to follow God as the King of their lives. Every cycle of destruction and pain is the natural outflow that each person decided that they could do whatever they personally thought was best without the unifying truth of the living God.
While this does not directly apply to "Covid-19 Quarantine 2020", here is the that we cannot miss. Our societal problems and our mistrust of one another and our lack of unity is a direct outflow of our personal realities.
Everyone is doing what THEY see as fit.
Millions upon millions of individual fiefdoms set up with our own castles outfitted with alligator filled moats and drawbridges. We sit on the rotting thrones of our own design and declare our personal feelings and living out of "our truth" as the sacrosanct non-negotiable standard of what is "good". To hell(literally) with anyone who says differently.
As we shout out our autonomy and freedom we conveniently ignore the clashing and destruction of the millions of others who are all clamoring for the same recognition. There is no gold at the end of the rainbow of self-centeredness. It is a prison that builds walls between us because our "truth" is nothing more then wavering opinions and fickle feelings that we go to war over with other peoples equally vacuous statements of self-indulgence.
Maybe we briefly intersect with another self-centered self-proclaimed monarch when our current opinions on "things" align, but like two ships passing in the night there is nothing permanent and fixed that we can lash our bows together with. They were brief travel companions as we head towards nothingness so we can try to feel justified as we proclaim with our false confidence to one another that surely this will all work out and hoping that if we say it enough to one another maybe we will believe it and feel safe.
It's two friend leaping out of a plane who hope that if they keep shouting over the rushing wind to one another that the ground really isn't rushing up to greet them it might just be ok.
You and I are not made for selfishness. We are made, designed, called and shaped by God. Not an amorphous ambiguous concept of deity, but a real, living, personal and loving Father who sent His Son to declare
"He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,"- Luke 4:18
We are oppressed. Not by corona, not by finances and family problems. Those are all real issues, but our oppression and imprisonment is that the castles we are trying to build for ourselves are crumbling all around us and Jesus has come to rescue us. Not for autonomy, but for Himself and His Kingdom.
The DNA of eternity is imprinted on our hearts and only at the foot of the Throne, made from a Cross, can we know what freedom, hope, love and purpose really means.
CS Lewis said it best about our corrupted mindsets.
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Do you want to have hope when you are locked in your home, separate from loved ones, when you aren't sure what the future holds.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.- Matthew 6:33
There is no other allegiance that your heart will be healed by. That your family will be healed by. That our world will be changed by.
