Real Talk: Corona, Control, and The Cross
I’ve felt increasingly challenged to remain upright in my thinking around the different ways that people I love and respect are responding to COVID-19 this week. Not coincidentally, several situations are threatening to disrupt my rhythms and norms completely separate from the stay-at-home order.
In the last month, multiple family members have faced serious health issues, our family has been preparing to move in a few days, and I've been looking at yet another shift in my employment situation. As the days have dragged on this week, I've noticed rising tension in my emotional response to others’ opinions.
I think I wanted to take hold of the different ways people are responding to our common crisis and reshape them by crafting some kind of universally convicting and correcting message. I’m realizing now that subconsciously, I thought if I could get people to agree with me and validate my thinking, I would feel like I had some control…
Like most of you, I have been wrongly conditioned to associate likeness with rightness. This is a dangerous point of societal brokenness that has prompted most of humanity’s most gruesome atrocities. It was this same kind of manipulative group-think, this drive for conformity, and greed for power and control that pressured Pilate into sending Jesus to the cross.
In some ways, I can be so much like the religious leaders who convinced each other to convince the people— some of the very same people who had worshipped Jesus as King only a few days earlier— to lobby for the crucifixion of the Messiah. How arrogant of me to think that others should get it “right” and realize that my way of thinking is the way to freedom and collective victory! Who am I to prescribe a way of looking at this when my own perspective is so limited?
And if that wasn’t a big enough piece of humble pie for the week, I’ve also had to stare down the fact that my disdain for the earthly authorities at play in our current reality feels alarmingly similar to the repulsion I feel toward the Pharisees with their hypocrisy and legalistic justification for their actions in condemning Jesus. I’m hearing Jesus loud and clear as He puts Pilate in his place; no one has any authority on earth that has not been issued to them by our ultimate Heavenly authority.
My gut reaction is to be annoyed to the point of outrage at the fact that God has sovereignly appointed evil people to carry out His will. But when I look at the scene that brought freedom to all people through the corruption of a few, I can trust that God is working out eternity in the micro plot of this moment in history.
As rough as this whole thought process was, I’m grateful that God brought me to a place of peace with all of our unique ways of coping with COVID-19. We all have permission to respond to our surreal existence in whatever way we need to in order to find peace and growth. It’s not up to me to right others’ thinking. It is up to me to look at my own attitude and efforts in prayer for the ones I allow to somehow offend me.
Once again, I hear God asking me to TRUST HIM with others. He’s reminding me that He’s working in each of our hearts and maturing all of us in ways that are as individualized as we are as His people. I am somehow both crippled and empowered by the very private humiliation I’ve experienced this week. It is in that uncomfortable dichotomy that I find the strength of Christ in me.
I pray that sharing my messy and ongoing process helps someone else muddle their way through this crazy time.