With the WMRA/WEMC studios being closed to all but essential personnel, I'm not sure when or if or I can record the following spots I prepared in light of the current COVID-19 crisis. WEMC (91.7 FM) continues to air reruns at noon each day and at 8 am Sunday, as do WBTX (102.1 FM, 1470 AM) 9:20 each weekday, and WNLR (1150 AM) M-W-F.
1 My friend Jake Lee, a pastor at Harrisonburg Mennonite Church, recently posted the following on his wonderful Spirit and Soil blog:
Coronavirus isn’t the only thing that’s viral, he notes. “Fear and hatred and indifference and violence and self-preservation are also viral. And so are compassion and faith and kindness and unconditional self-giving love.” The question we should ask, he says, is not if we are contagious to others, but rather, how we are contagious to others. He writes:
“In the second century, a great plague struck the Roman Empire that ground it to a halt. This was more than a two week quarantine or an eight week travel advisory. This plague lasted fifteen years. It killed a quarter to a third of the population. The great physician of the day, Galen, not only advised everyone to flee to the countryside; he himself fled to the countryside. But one group stayed in Rome to care for the sick. They were known as Christians. They stayed to minister to those from whom everyone else had fled. Many Christians died. But here’s the deal: many didn’t. In fact, the death rate among those who stayed was less than those who fled. And not only so, those who were cared for by these Christians survived at a greater rate than those who weren’t. In other words, there was another contagion being spread by a group who sought to follow Jesus in the Way of Jesus, the way of sacrificial, unconditional, persistent, present love. And that contagion, that love proved to be far more viral than the plague it confronted.”
2 As I’m recording this in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, I find myself reflecting on the dramatic changes it’s brought into the lives of everyone in our community and around the world.
Certainly it teaches us is how dependent we all are on others, and as people of faith, on God and on God’s people, for our wellbeing and our very survival.
And I find it fitting that this comes during our season of Lent, which many associate with the discipline of doing without things we normally enjoy on a regular basis. This year we are having some of those kinds of self-denials imposed on us, reminding us there are so many blessings we take for granted, including, for some, the privilege of being able to work and earn in the ways we are accustomed to.
We don’t know what kinds of hardships all this may yet create for ourselves and for people worldwide. So our tendency may be to want to limit our charitable giving at a time of economic uncertainty. But should this have the opposite affect, making us especially generous with whatever we can contribute to help relieve suffering all around the world, with the millions of refugees, for example, lacking sufficient water for sanitation and having woefully inadequate health care even for normal times?
Surely this pandemic should remind us that all lines between “us” and “them” are meaningless, and that none of us can be safe from something like COVID-19 until we are all safe from it.
3 Just over a century ago, the so-called Spanish flu epidemic ravaged our nation and deploy touched our own community. Almost every local cemetery has graves marking loved ones lost in that tragedy, many of them children.
I’ve been thinking how much more difficult it must have been for individuals and families in those days who didn’t have the benefit of telephone or internet communication to stay in touch with their neighbors or to reach out for help or comfort in a time of so much illness and death. People had to walk or go by horseback or carriage to convey a message to their their neighbors with their needs or their offers of help.
On the other hand, I’m sure there was a sense of community that helped sustain them, and most were a part of larger farm families with some stores of home grown food in their cellars.
Today, we can be grateful for being able to shelter in place with more means of communication with others without having to leave our homes. Some grocery stores and pharmacies offer delivery services, communities of faith are making services available on line, and at agencies like the Family Life Resource Center we are now able to offer counseling by phone or through a video connection with clients’ personal computers, tablets or smart phones.
So don’t hesitate to call or message others whenever and wherever we need to at a time like this.
4 Devotional writer James Baer tells about a Russian family he visited years ago who had the words, “It will not always be as it is now” written in large print on a placard on their dining room wall.
It turns out that years before the father had spent years in a Soviet prison for refusing to enlist in the Russian army because of his conviction that as a Christian he could take part in war. It was then that the mother had written these words and posted them as a sign of hope for herself and her children, trusting that one day their father would return and things would be better.
When the father was finally released and life greatly improved, some friends asked why she had not removed the words from her wall. Her reply was simply, “Because it’s still true that 'It will not always be as it is now.’”
Just as in times of stress we need hope, so when things are going well we need to remember that all nations, economies and cultures will eventually face crises and tragedies of one kind or another, and that things can change rapidly, for the better or worse. Meanwhile, we need to have a heart that suffers with those experiencing illness and loss, and do everything we can to offer them help, just as we would have others offer us if we were in similar straits.
5 Even when children aren’t cooped up at home due to school closings, we often hear them complain, “I’m bored. There’s nothing to do!” in spite of their being surrounded by dozens of toys and games, and shelves full of good books plus a library just down the street and cable television with over 100 channels.
Or we teens or young adults lamenting, “This town is dead. There’s just nothing to go to, or do, around here” even before the COVID-19 pandemic. I certainly understand the challenge these times create, but we’ve long experienced an epidemic of boredom in an age that offers far more entertainment options than any comparable era in history.
Neil Postman, best selling author of the book AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, believes we have become satiated with far too much entertainment, that we’ve forgotten how to use our own God-given creativity to come up with satisfying and worthwhile activities worthy of our time.
Perhaps we should think of some boredom as not only natural, but actually a good motivator for getting our creative juices flowing.
So the next time we hear a child or teen or a fellow adult complaining of boredom, instead of rushing to their rescue, we might simply say, “Wow, that’s interesting. I wonder what you’ll come up with to remedy that?”
6 There’s a delightful little story in Robert Fulghum’s ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN about a kid in his neighborhood who, when they played Hide and Seek, had the habit of hiding so well that no one could find him. “After a while we would give up on him and go off,” he writes, “leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn’t keep looking for him.”
He then gives an example of how as adults we too can “hide too well,” as in the case of a doctor friend who was dying of cancer, but he wanted to spare his friends and family as much suffering as he could, and so kept his feelings about his condition largely to himself. When he died, some of those in his circle of loved ones were angry because he hid too well, that he didn’t allow them to share in more of what he was going through, that he didn’t trust them enough to lean on them for strength, that he really said good-bye.
In our professed desire to protect others from pain by not disclosing our own, we are most likely trying to protect ourselves. Better to “trust unto others as we would have them trust unto us." To risk being honest. To risk being found.
When we feel excessively anxious, lonely, or stressed in times like these, don’t hesitate to reach out for some much needed help.
7) At a time when we are suffering from fears of coronavirus infection I think of the plight of millions of inmates in crowded jails and prisons, as well as tens of millions of refugees around the world who face terrible hardships. From a February, 2020, TIME magazine article:
“To avoid getting caught in the crossfire, nearly 900,000 Syrians have left their homes… heading north… through the snow in sub-zero temperatures. The vast majority… are women and children, who, if they’re fortunate, find space in makeshift displacement camps with tents that are stretched beyond capacity without basic services… thousands live in the open among the icy hillsides or unfinished buildings… Mothers are burning garbage to keep children warm. Babies and small children are freezing to death.”
All of us who profess to be pro-life need to make sacrifices to help our fellow human beings in situations like these. For example:
1)We can and must give extravagantly to relief organizations offering aid to refugees.
2) We can drastically reduce our overconsumption for our own comfort and convenience and reinvest in causes that help alleviate suffering around the world.
3) We can help reduce the demand for fossil fuels that contribute to pollution and climate change that increase the likelihood of record breaking droughts, floods and other unnatural disasters.
4) We can urge nations everywhere to stop adding billions to their "defense budgets" capable of killing ever more people while people are dying from lack of food and shelter.
