A friend commented this afternoon in an email about -- what else? cancelling plans:
Watched most of it, and was moved by how reassuring--and powerful--it was to be reminded that something bigger than us, bigger than the coronavirus, is at work in the universe, caring for us.
I wouldn't know about how it was to watch the livestream, because I was the lector, and my mood is never improved by watching myself later on video. A screen shot on Facebook showed me at the lectern with a pale face and frizzy hair. I should perhaps have heeded that twinge of vanity last night that asked, makeup in the morning?
As the church communications staff person, I was also the copier-and-paster of links—onto Facebook, a web page, email, all complicated by a little technical problem (no audio) that meant we started the whole thing over -- at a new URL -- about 15 minutes in.
This was the first time our service was live-streamed. Plans had been in the works for a while, with a scheduled debut of, what do you know, March 15. Apparently God had a hand in the timing. With gatherings of more than 50 people shut down for the next couple months, YouTube and Facebook and, God help us, Twitter, will have to get better at reminding us of things bigger than us, bigger than the coronavirus. And since we are the ones who provide the content for social media, that means we ourselves will need to get better at thinking bigger.
This evening it all feels like a dystopian movie to me, and frankly, I'd like it to end and the credits to roll, so that I can get up and walk out of the theatre into a bright sunny day in another place and time. (Denial is not just a river in Egypt.) I've planned and started knitting projects today, talked and texted with friends and family, struggled to get ahead or simply catch up in Scrabble games on my phone, and wondered and worried about everything from is it okay to pick up my new glasses at Walgreens to the global economy. These worries, and new ones are likely to reappear in a few hours -- long before the alarm goes off in the morning.
I grew up believing things work out somehow and I myself could rise to meet any challenge. Decades of experience have dimmed my optimism. Does this have something to do with what Paul wrote in Romans 5:1-11, about suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope -- and "hope does not disappoint us"? Those last words were an anchor for me when my son was diagnosed with ALS in 2014 and died in 2017. Early this morning, as I practiced reading them out loud, I noticed there was no period after "us," and I was going to have to vocally connect that wonderfully rhetorical crescendo leading up to hope into yet one more clause before the paragraph ended:
Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
I don't think I succeeded in doing this during the reading this morning, at least not with the little trick that worked so well in the kitchen while the coffee was brewing, but there it is: "because God's love." The thing that makes us bigger.
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