Great and abundant

Yesterday I saw a flag flying that said “Keep America Great,” and I had to wonder which part of America we think is great.  Is it the West Coast on fire, spewing noxious smoke across the globe?  Or the flooded Southeast strewn with people waiting for rescue on the roofs of their ruined homes?  Perhaps the tanked economy.  Nationwide riots?  Or was the rampant disease not enough?  Well, at least we still have confidence in the peaceful transfer of fairly elected power, right?

I live 3,000 miles from California and the sun is obscured by forest fire smoke.  At my house.  It’s cold enough in the haze that I feel bad for the dinosaurs during that asteroid incident.

My kids are growing up in a world where you have to find your shoes AND your mask before you go out the door.  The librarians, the cashiers, the teachers are all behind a shield or on a screen.  We can no longer read each other’s facial expressions.  There’s so much insistence on contradictory information out there we’re tempted to ask with Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”*

Yesterday also I read two articles:  the first saying that a vaccine probably won’t be available to the public until late 2021 (one year from now), and the second saying that covid sufferers are often left with indefinitely-long-term, “debilitating” fatigue, and that “women and those with histories of anxiety or depression” are most likely to experience this.

If you’re not starting to hyperventilate yet, please just bear with me.  In truth, I feel like the Lord Rhoop in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

“We’re going round and round in circles.  We shall never get out.”  The stranger, who had been lying in a huddled heap on the deck, sat up and burst out into a horrible screaming laugh.

“Never get out!” he yelled.  “That’s it.  Of course.  We shall never get out.  What a fool I was to have thought they would let me go as easily as that.  No, no, we shall never get out.”

We’re restarting our Sunday school class this weekend.  At least one of our Sunday school friends is immunocompromised.  Another works at ground zero of our latest local outbreak.  

Breathe.  Breathe.

Breathing!  We’ll all be breathing on each other!!

We set up our chairs spaced apart and plan to leave the door and windows open.  I’m still not thrilled.  But the risk/benefit ratio has been weighed and this is what we’re going to do.

I would much rather crawl into my hermitage and stay there until it’s over (in other words, pretty much forever, apparently).  But in reviewing a sermon series on “The God Who Gives,” I came across this passage:

Now, brethren, we wish to make known to you the grace of God which has been given in the churches of Macedonia, that in a great ordeal of affliction their abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality.

~1 Corinthians 8:1-2

Great ordeal of affliction?  Check.  So when the Macedonians were in their great ordeal of affliction, their abundance of anxiety overflowed in their crawling into their hideaways, yes?

No.

The generous Macedonians gave at a time of great suffering.  Their ordeal was great, but their joy was simultaneously abundant.  And they gave.  

And so I will give of myself in a way that feels sacrificial.  Because my brothers and sisters are lonely and hungry for the Word.  And I trust that God gives grace in affliction—grace that will be enough even for me.

*John 8:38