Faith Challenges: It Ain't All Comfort

I miss life as we knew it. I want us to get back to that. We all feel that way. A return to normalcy just seems like what the doctor ordered. We know better. We all do. We still want what we want. It is tough having to adjust to a reality we don't really understand and never prepared to face. I want to get everyone back together at church on Sunday. It would feel like an emotional release of pent up frustration. We would gather afterwards in the fellowship hall for a shared meal. People would stick around and play table games, talk, catch up with one another, and feel really connected for the first time in a long time. Oh, we would be having the time of our lives! Literally. Two weeks later, I would likely be calling everybody back together for one or more memorial services. Then we would kick ourselves for allowing our emotional angst to guide our actions. We would burrow deeper into the guilt superimposed on the grief with which we have been struggling over the last

"Let not your minds be troubled." — Jesus Life takes us by surprise. Those things we never expected to happen occur. Things we believed would transpire never do. We are not all that good at prognosticating. We do about as well as our old caricatures of meteorologists forecasting snow. We just can’t quite get our predictions to work out and end up grieving over life handing us what we never expected. We act like we should be able to plan effectively for the future, but all too often those plans don’t work out according to our projections. When we find someone for whom a plan came together, we heap praise upon them, even though it is very likely they got it right by accident. Then we want to use their experience as a model for success. We parade them around the country as a guru, when they simply had a case of dumb luck. At least, that is our normal experience in life. Plans fall to the wayside due to our lack of seeing all the possibilities and understanding the

"Therefore encourage one another with these words." — 1st Thessalonians 4:18 The last few weeks have ushered a new way of life into our midst. Goals and projects that were vague considerations and concerns not yet pressing have come to the fore. Routines and habits have been discarded like dirty napkins. Toilet paper seems to be front and center on everyone’s minds, even while much of the world never adopted our North American use of toilet paper. The internet has taken on a different role in our lives. Online shopping is taking on a deeper role in our society than a month ago. We brought a couple of young men into our home in the last month. Offering them a place to stay when they had nowhere else to go shifted from one plane to another with the rapidly developing news and presence of Covid19 in the world, in our nation, and in our state. When one of these young men developed all the symptoms of Covid19, I took him to be tested. When he developed respiratory distr