Letter 17:
“I waited patiently for the LORD to help me, and he turned to me and heard my cry.” (Psalm 40:1)
Dear Friends,
Lockdown has been difficult for many of us. I have found some of its restrictions very challenging and a little scary, truth be told. We are not used to having to guard our ways and our behaviours. It seems harsh and unnatural, this game with its new rules that we can’t hug the ones we love or move about with the unfettered freedom we have come to think is our right. But this hiatus has also provided us with time to stop and look around, and to listen. I am thankful to the Lord that I can see strong walls around me and a roof that doesn’t leak, and that I possess enough funds to pay my bills and then some. I know that others are not as fortunate. I am glad I have a good wife who is kind and gentle and patient with me. Lockdown has put great pressure on many relationships and thousands of men and women have gone through acrimonious separations. I have been thankful for the clear skies and the empty roads and the sound of bird song the like of which I haven’t hear since my childhood. Even though those empty roads have meant unemployment for some. It’s as if the LORD has brought our frenzied business to a standstill. This has been, I believe, a divinely-imposed standstill which has not only reminded us daily of our limitations, but that Covid-19 is one of God’s instruments to draw us closer to Him and to each other, even while we stay apart physically.
I know that others have been so consumed by worries and by suffering that they cannot see or hear or experience a single thing that is positive. Even those who know the Lord have been brought low. I am thankful too that in the Bible I have, like you do, an inexhaustible supply of wisdom and encouragement to help me, to force me almost, to see what God has to say in all of this strangeness. I have found myself reading the book of Leviticus, probably the least read book in the entire Bible! But in that book (thousands of years old) there is the link between hand hygiene and public health, the whole issue of infection control within God’s earliest community and the need for quarantine and isolation in order to protect the individual and the community. God got there first! He commanded sanitation stations. I don’t suppose I would have been so keen to spend as many days in the third book had it not been for the Coronavirus pandemic. So, I suppose what I’m saying is that I suspect it may be more difficult for me to come out of my little bubble than for others. But I’m not embarrassed to say that this time has been good for me and my further education. Many of us have learned new things and developed new skills during this period, so that necessity has indeed been the mother of creativity or invention or some such saying!
I have rediscovered that God’s Word covers every need and situation in real life. And that God is in this thing and with us. I have trodden less travelled paths in God’s Word recently and found those bye ways fascinating and relevant. But God’s Word is there to be applied as well. I have also again discovered in my early forays into the “new normal” world that putting the things I have learned into practice is, as ever, much more difficult to do! It’s one thing to know chapter and verse; it’s another entirely to live out those things in the world of real of challenges and in the world of people who try your patience!
I have learned that God is in this thing with us! The deacons and I have begun to have meetings about when we might come together again and how we might have to “do church” in the strange new world in which we live. I ask of you prayer and patience, things that are integral to the learnings of the people of God! You will receive a letter in the next few days in which our plans for worship in the near future will be outlined. Patience is the hardest thing to learn.
God is not the God of the quick fix. Neither is he the LORD of the instant. He takes his time growing an oak from an acorn and allows a long winter of isolation to prepare the earth for the warmth of spring. But it is precisely the promise of spring that makes a winter of waiting all the more palatable. Why does God make us wait? Maybe because we’ll only really appreciate how solid the rock is when we have had to go through the mud and the mire.
Jesus said, “By your endurance you will gain your lives.” (Luke 21: 19)
Every Blessing from Mark & Susan (08/07/20)