“We’re living in the branch of history it created”
Five years ago today, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Just reading that sentence brings back horrible memories for me, as I’m sure it does for you. Images of portable morgues, patients dying alone in isolation wards, people masking out of fear of everyone they meet. It seemed nearly everything was shut down, from restaurants and businesses to schools and churches. No one knew when a vaccine would arrive, assuming one could be developed.
More than seven million people are confirmed to have died from the virus, though some estimates suggest the pandemic has actually caused between nineteen and thirty-six million deaths worldwide.
But these numbers, as horrific as they are, don’t begin to tell the whole story.
“It shattered our cities and disordered society”
According to New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells, we’re living in the “branch of history” the pandemic created, one whose “contours are only now coming into view.” He writes: “We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.”
Among the changes he lists, I found these especially relevant for today’s article:
- “It turned us into hyperindividualists” in response to a tragedy so unthinkable and massive, we learned to process it through the lens of personal experience—and still do.
- “It inaugurated a new age of social Darwinism” as the survivors credit themselves and blame others for the crisis.
- “It broke our faith in public health” as debates erupted (and continue) over vaccines, masking, and the credibility of health officials.
- “It shattered our cities and disordered society”—homicides jumped nearly 30 percent in just a single year, homelessness surged, and drinking problems escalated, as did drug overdoses and traffic accident deaths. Many of these effects were temporary, but the politics of crime and disorder persist.
Wallace-Wells concludes: “Perhaps the biggest shock was realizing we still live in history—and at the mercy of biology.” Foreign Policy agrees, warning that “the status quo won’t save us from the next pandemic” and urging immediate steps to construct a global system for responding more effectively to future pandemic threats.
Saying more prayers is not the answer
While political leaders and public health officials will be on the front lines of the next pandemic, you and I are on the front lines of culture now. There is only one answer to our hyperindividualism, social Darwinism, broken faith in leaders, and shattered and disordered society.
It is not a revival of religion, though Wallace-Wells notes that the pandemic “may have halted the years-long decline of Christianity in America.” The cultural Christianity that passes for religion in our secularized society is no match for biology and the disasters it produces in our fallen world.
You may be surprised to hear me say this, but being more religious—going to more church services, reading more Bible texts, and saying more prayers—is not the answer in itself. Nor will the anodyne and customized “spirituality” of our day meet the moment.
Instead, we need what humans have always needed.
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
Luke 24 tells us that a group of women went to Jesus’ tomb “on the first day of the week,” where they were shocked to find it empty (vv. 1–3). Then two angels met them, asking: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (v. 5).
This is such a powerful question still today.
We “seek the living among the dead” whenever we treat Jesus as anything or anyone other than our living Lord. When he is an idea, a theology, a model, or a movement, he is as dead as if he were Buddha or Muhammad. When we seek and encounter him as a living person, only then do we experience the strength, wisdom, and peace he alone can give us amid the crises we face.
The problem is that it’s hard in our materialistic culture to seek that which must be known through faith rather than through experience. We understand cemeteries, not resurrections. We’re comfortable with theology, less with Theo.
But when we meet the living Lord for ourselves, as two men did later that first Easter Sunday, we hear his word to us (v. 27). We experience his presence in prayer and worship (v. 30). Then our eyes are “opened” and our “hearts burn within us” (vv. 31–32). And we are compelled to tell others what we have experienced (vv. 33–35), so they can experience him as well (vv. 36–49).
And a religion about Jesus becomes a transforming relationship with him.
God is “able to make all grace abound to you”
This is a day to remember the millions who died from the pandemic and the multiplied millions who still grieve their loss. It is a day to pray for our leaders and public health officials in the assumption that more pandemics are in our future.
And it is a day to seek a deeper, more intimate relationship with the living Lord Jesus than we have ever known. Why?
- He is “able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).
- He is “able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:8).
- He is “able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).
- He is “able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).
- He is “able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy” (Jude 24).
In short, as Paul testified, “he is able” (2 Timothy 1:12).
Where would you say you are on your faith journey with him today?
NOTE: I frequently write articles for our website on breaking news and current events. I invite you to visit our website daily for more content from me and our writing team.
Quote for today:
“How wonderful to know that Christianity is more than a padded pew or a dim cathedral, but that it is a real, living, daily experience which goes on from grace to grace.” —Jim Elliot
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