A Moment with Moses

Posted on April 28, 2020 by awtraughber

These last few years I’ve been thinking about “leadership” much more often than I thought it would.  So it’s no surprise that a recent reread of a moment in the life of Moses stuck out to me in a way I hadn’t thought much about before.

In Exodus 18, Moses has led the people out of Egypt to Mount Sinai. Before going to the mountaintop to receive the law, Moses is met by Jethro, his father-in-law.  Jethro brings Moses’ wife and children with him.

7 Moses went out to meet his father-in-law and bowed down and kissed him. And they asked each other of their welfare and went into the tent. 8 Then Moses told his father-in-law all that the Lord had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel’s sake, all the hardship that had come upon them in the way, and how the Lord had delivered them. 9 And Jethro rejoiced for all the good that the Lord had done to Israel, in that he had delivered them out of the hand of the Egyptians.

Then Jethro praises the God Moses has obeyed and even offers a burnt offering and sacrifice.

The next day, Moses gets back to work acting as a judge for the people.  In the midst of it, Jethro gives some advice.  Advice, of course, can be a tricky thing, both in the giving and receiving.  Jethro sees what leading the people has done to Moses and has advice on how to balance things out:

13 The next day Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. 14 When Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, “What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?” 15 And Moses said to his father-in-law, “Because the people come to me to inquire of God; 16 when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.” 17 Moses’ father-in-law said to him, “What you are doing is not good. 18 You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone. 19 Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God, 20 and you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do. 21 Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. 22 And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you.

Here’s what is interesting to me at this particular moment: when Jethro makes this suggestion, he isn’t doing it so Moses can pursue his bliss or go out on retreat or to work on some side project.  Jethro sets things up so Moses can do the more vital, only-he-can-do work that God intends: mediate with God, warn the people, and show the people the way they should go.  No side hustle here.  No walk in the park, either.  Moses is to be directly tied to the most basic things about God’s relationship with His people. (One gets the sense that this could even by a kind of “prototype” of the New Testament church and the introduction of deacons as servants with the people.)

And then finally this:

23 If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace.”

Divine direction, endurance, and people at peace.  These are real evidences of God’s presence and work among His people.  A good reminder of what can be possible when structure and calling and community work well together, both for the leader and for those being led.

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The Before and After of Easter

Posted on April 25, 2020 by awtraughber

Over the last couple of years, I’ve found the lens of friendship to be one way to deepen my understanding of the Easter story.  I even tried to articulate it in my Easter talk for chapel a couple of weeks ago.  From the “last straw” of Lazarus’ resuscitation to the sleeping inner core of Jesus’ group, from the betrayal of Judas and the denials of Peter to the giving of Mary to to John, the final stories of Easter are full with the stuff of real relationships.  So I was glad to see Peter Leithart at First Things do the same, particularly in contrast to the regular emphasis on the torture, trial, and death of Jesus.  In his recent post titled “Apostles Dead and Risen”:

Edifying as these meditations may be, they don’t represent the focus of the canonical Gospels, which emphasize Christ’s “relational” anguish more than his physical suffering. He comes to his own people, but they prefer Caesar to their heavenly king. For three years, Jesus and his disciples travel together, preach together, heal and exorcise demons together. They share meals, and in private Jesus teaches them the secrets of the kingdom. But at the climax of the mission, the disciples scatter. Judas betrays him, Peter denies him, and the other ten disciples scamper away at the first sign of danger. Because they defy his exhortations to “take up your cross and follow,” Jesus goes to the cross alone.

This reminds us of the fuller sense of what Henri Blocher calls “the utter evilness of evil” that Jesus experiences in his death: it’s not just physical and spiritual, it is also personal.  Very personal.  But Leithart reminds us that with Easter, death does not have the final say.  In his essay, Leithart traces the final things (not) said and (not) done by the disciples in the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday stories.  And he brings things back around with Easter Sunday.

John alone records how the Twelve are re-individualized, reactivated, and reconciled. John is the only Evangelist to inform us that one of the Twelve, the “Beloved Disciple,” is at the cross (19:25–27). John alone writes of Peter’s race with the Beloved Disciple to the empty tomb (20:1–10) and Thomas’s doubts (20:19–29). He alone records the inexpressibly lovely scene when Jesus restores Peter as table companion and shepherd at a seaside breakfast around a charcoal fire (21:1–17).

And then he ends with an almost-nod to a Rich Mullins song and a real sense that Easter brings life back to many things.

Jesus is made of no reputation; he is silent as a lamb before his accusers. Through Jesus’s trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, the Twelve are also nameless and speechless, and through three Gospels they remain anonymous and silent right to the end. But they don’t remain so. The fourfold Gospel announces the good news that betrayers become shepherds, the nameless receive names, the silent are given speech. The fourfold Gospel proclaims not only the resurrection of Jesus, but also the resurrection of the apostles, foundation stones on which Jesus builds his church.

The essay dovetailed nicely with today’s reading from John 16.  As Jesus gets closer to his arrest in John’s Gospel, he’s having to work through the disciples’ inability to understand what he is trying to communicate his coming and going, his death and resurrection.

19 Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Is this what you are asking yourselves, what I meant by saying, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’? 20 Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. 21 When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. 22 So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. 23 In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. 24 Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

The “before” of Easter is a thing of sadness and sorrow, rooted in confusion and loss.  And it’s almost like all of the confusion of the last three years has come to a head in this moment.  But with the resurrection?  with the seeing of Jesus on the other side of the tomb?  Then their hearts will rejoice in a way that no one will ever be able to take away (for to have seen the resurrected Jesus would realign everything for them.  And in that day, they will ask nothing because they will see all that they need to see.  And when they do ask, their requests will have been shaped by the most true reality of all.  And in that asking and receiving, the joy of that resurrection moment will be renewed.   It is as if until they see Jesus again, they will not realize that they haven’t known what to say or do or ask the whole time.  But once they have seen him, once God has done his work through Easter Sunday, they will know and will have been shot through with joy, will have joy (re)defined for them.  And it will change everything.

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A Moment without Time

Posted on April 24, 2020 by awtraughber

Over the last couple of days Damon Linker’s recent article from The Week about Our Current Moment and and the passage of time has shown up in a number of different places.  It’s a good piece that speaks to the more emotional (but no less important) side of things.   He begins:

Time, like life, hasn’t stopped under lockdown. It only feels that way.

Amidst the pervasive anxiety about illness and economic hardship, it can be easy to miss somewhat subtler forms of distress — like the sense that time itself is coming unwound, with forward motion halted.

He uses the examples of his own children, a high school senior and an up-and-coming high school as a lens to make sense of the “timeless” sensation so many might be feeling while in lockdown.

Human beings live their lives in time. Our sense of ourselves in the present is always in part a function of our remembrance and constant reinterpretation of our pasts along with our projection of future possibilities. We live for the person we hope to become. We look forward to who we will be a month or a year or a decade or more from now — and we commemorate the transitions from present to future with rites of passage celebrated in public with loved ones and friends. This makes us futural creatures. A high school senior applying for a university is living for the college student he hopes to be a year in the future. But what is a high school senior who can no longer look forward to a first day on campus next fall?

And while I would argue that a high school senior is more than just the thought of a “first day on campus,” I totally get his point.  Because we all live pointed towards something.  And right or wrong, that’s how many highs school students are oriented.  He continues:

A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it’s a life haunted by a shadow of futility.

Linker’s great concern in the piece is about our emotional wellness, about what we might be losing in the process of trying to save so many.  And it is definitely worth thinking about and processing, and not only for the sake of where we are pointed beyond the now.  Because it also says something about who we are in this moment, however odd the timing might feel.  That, I think, is a vital conversation to have.  You should give the whole essay a quality moment of your day.

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Warmth in the Winter

Posted on April 23, 2020 by awtraughber

Perhaps the clearest voice for me as I’ve tried to understand Our Current Moment has been Andy Crouch.  He doesn’t work alone, of course.  With the team at Praxis, he has articulated a handful of thoughtful articles that have brought a sense of clarity institutionally and Christianly.  And when he hasn’t been writing, he has been directing people to other good, thoughtful writing.

Crouch recently spoke at the Q 2020 Virtual Summit.  He posted a tidied-up version of his talk to his website.  It’s definitely worth a read.  He starts be reiterating the analogy of our time as blizzard, winter, and ice age.  From there, he touches on 1816, “the year without a summer.”   He connects to the work of Scott Gottlieb, who has been a voice of reason these last few weeks, particularly as he refers to the possibility of an “80% economy” moving forward.  And then, as he acknowledges a worst-case scenario, he brings the biblical story to bear.  And it is wonderful:

And this is where it is great to be part of the story and people of God—because the people of God faced and experienced the absolute worst-case scenario, which was exile: to have your nation conquered, your leaders deported, your culture assimilated, eradicated, eliminated. And this happened to Israel twice in the Old Testament period. Assyria took the Northern Kingdom; and then Babylon, Judah and the Southern Kingdom. Psalm 137 preserves for us the lament of a people who said, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? By the waters of Babylon we laid down our harps, when we remembered Zion.”

The amazing gift of exile is that you discover a very unexpected answer to the lament of Psalm 137. Which is that you can sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, even as you have to make unthinkable adjustments. The rabbis had to ask, after the Temple was defiled and destroyed: We can no longer gather in the Temple and know that the presence of God is there. We can no longer be present by the thousands, all the clans and families of Israel together in worship. What is the minimum number, how few Jews do there have to be to be able to trust that God is present? They came up with the number called the minyan: ten. If just ten Jews could gather to pray, God would be there.

He writes then of numbers, particularly the smaller ones, that show as significant in the stories of Jesus in the Gospel.  My favorite:

The rabbis said ten, but Jesus says, “When two or three of you are gathered in my name, I will be present in the midst of them.”

He ends the piece by throwing the down gauntlet on culture and transformation, something that is close to his heart (and close to the heart of many who try to understand and work well with the institutions that shape our lives).  Like so many other pieces, it is both a sobering and an encouraging read.  It is definitely worth your time to read well.

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Shock but not Surprise

Posted on April 22, 2020 by awtraughber

Yesterday our administration announced that we would remain in online learning protocol through the end of the year.  While I wasn’t surprised by the decision, there’s still something of a “shock to the system” with the news.  It’s one thing to be out with a temporary mindset, with at least some hope of return.  This is a little different.  And while it’s a kind of shock, it also allows us to set our minds for the end, which is good.

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Yesterday I came across a sobering blog post by a professor at Bethel University concerning the school’s future.  Early in the post he makes clear the difficult position his school is in: thirty faculty positions done away with . . . and that was in the works before Our Current Moment.  And so Chris Gehrz tries to reconcile this “difficult time” with “Easter time, a season of joy, peace, and hope.”  Ultimately, the piece is a beautiful picture of a resilient call to vocation.

How many times over the last few years have I said some version of this: “We shouldn’t just believe in the resurrection. We should live as if we believe in the resurrection”? Again and again, I’ve repeated that mantra at Bethel as part of my ongoing efforts to explain what our Pietist heritage means to us. Whether I was addressing new faculty or students gathered in chapel, I’ve insisted that Pietists — for whom Christianity is experienced and practiced more than it’s believed — should not trumpet their fidelity to the doctrine of resurrection but continue to live in fear.

We should live in hope. I still believe that.

But that axiom sure feels trite right now.

Even if we could somehow suspend our fears of an invisible contagion spreading a potentially fatal disease, many of us at Bethel are experiencing the death of dreams and ideals and relationships. Losing a faculty position at a place like Bethel means the loss of income and stability, but also threatens a loss of calling. Most of those who lose their positions will struggle to find anything like a true replacement; many will have to leave academia and seek work in a depressed economy.

Throughout the rest of his post, Gehrz weaves together moments from the biblical story that can help us see Our Current Moment in light of the good but difficult truths of the Gospel.  He brings together two moments from Luke’s writings in particular that point towards “promise and purpose” and the calling Jesus placed on the lives of those who followed Him.

A promise: we will receive the power of the Holy Spirit. Nothing this week will break that promise or sap that power. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells” in us, then “he who raised Christ from the dead will” continue to give us life by that Spirit (Rom 8:11). If there’s nothing in all creation that’s high or deep enough to separate us from the love of our resurrecting God, then whatever happens at Bethel surely won’t.

And a purpose: to bear witness near and far to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even if I can no longer do that through teaching at Bethel, I can trust that I will continue to fulfill that commission some way, some how, and some where, with whatever post-Bethel days I have remaining.

The post, which Gehrz admits is a kind of “big talk” on his part, brings out some necessary nuance to understanding the precarious nature of our lives today, particularly if we are people whose loves and livelihoods are tied to broader institutions.  The whole piece is worth a read and a re-read.  As the title of his essay suggests, it is in the “nothing for your journey” call from Jesus that we might find something better . . . both for ourselves and those broader institutions.

You can read the rest of the piece here.  I highly recommend it.

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A Longer Song

Posted on April 21, 2020 by awtraughber

Up until recently, I had an iPhone with an unfortunate iTunes quirk: it would only play songs in shuffle mode.  Regardless if it was by artist or by album, I just couldn’t listen to something the way it had been laid out by the creators.  I tried to fix it at first, but I eventually gave up for a time.  When I got a new phone last fall, the first thing I checked was the iTunes play.  I felt a kind of relief that things were back to normal.

I say this because Andrew Peterson just wrote a nice piece about the joys of listening to an album as an album.  And it came up for him because his daughter, a young musician herself, had grown tired of “singles.”  It’s a fun piece that waxes both philosophical (about streaming services) and nostalgic (like the paragraphs below).

When I was a kid, we didn’t have much money. That meant it was a big deal if I saved the ten bucks to buy a tape at Turtle’s Music in Gainesville. When I got home I would smell the cassette, unfold the booklet, and read the tiny liner notes while I listened. I would treat the tape like it was a rare jewel. I had to think twice before I lent it to someone, and I always made sure I got it back when they were finished. The cassette was a treasure. When I rode in my buddy Joe’s 280 ZX I would drool all over the tapes in his Case Logic case and beg him to lend me the newest Tom Petty album. He had to think about it hard, because if he did, it meant he couldn’t listen to it in the meantime. He would miss it, pine for it, until I gave it back.

Not only was the artifact itself a treasure, it wasn’t easy to skip songs—which meant you discovered buried treasures within the treasure. You had to suffer through songs you didn’t like in order to get to the ones you did, giving the B-sides time to grow on you, with the happy result that they became favorites. Nowadays, if I don’t like a song it’s really easy to remove it from a playlist and never give it another shot, and I’m certain that by doing so I’m missing out on some great music.

And then this:

My point is this: if I made a list of my very favorite albums of all time, I’m pretty sure most of them cost me some time and effort before they really clicked. The key was the scarcity. The fact that the CD or tape lived in my car and I didn’t have the world at my fingertips meant that I gave the songs time to unfold themselves to me, to surprise me, to shift the tectonic plates of my taste and understanding enough that the next time I looked out the window I could tell the landscape had subtly broadened. The time spent with the music was the key that unlocked it—and the music, in turn, was the key that unlocked something in me. None of that would have happened if I had bumped up against a difficult song and merely skipped it or removed it from the playlist. Back then, the interface made it a little more difficult to banish a song into outer darkness. But now, the path of least resistance is to make a knee-jerk decision about a song and never revisit it, or to mean to go back and listen again but forget because eighty-five new albums came out today.

I think most of us have certain albums and artists that we think of because of this.  Music and long walks has been something of a regular thing for me for a long time (though less now since I refuse to buy a waterproof phone).  I think of my summer missions summer and the albums we would play on our long rides: Rich Mullins’ Songs or the self-titled Caedmon’s Call or Chris Rice’s Deep Enough to Dream.  All of them, for me at least, always the whole way through.  That’s the world at the time, at least as best as I can remember it.

You can read the whole piece here.  It’s good on multiple levels.

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How to Think in 2020

Posted on April 20, 2020 by awtraughber

Each fall I get to read through How to Think by Alan Jacobs with a group of high school juniors.  It is an attempt to help students think about thinking, to consider why they have landed where they have landed on certain things.  We pick some of the threads back up in their senior year, though I fear much of what was read previously is forgotten.

It’s difficult to tell what students think . . . and know . . . about Our Current Moment.  It’s often difficult to tell what most adults think  . . . and know . . . about Our Current Moment, too.  Which is why I’m glad Jacobs continues to think about how we think.  In a recent blog post, “Thinking during Covidtide,” he revisits the threads of the Repugnant Cultural Other, Sunk Costs, and the necessarily communal nature of thinking.  He then pivots to a post by Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative that acts as a kind of “catalogue” of how those concepts might be working themselves out these days, particularly in Christian circles.  He then gets to his point, which is the point of so much teaching and learning if only we would remember it:

We are looking here at the consequences of decades of neglect by American churches, and what they have neglected is Christian formation. The whole point of discipleship — which is, nota bene, a word derived from discipline — is to take what Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity” and make it, if not straight, then straighter. To form it in the image of Jesus Christ. And yes, with humans this is impossible, but with a gracious God all things are possible. And it’s a good thing that with a gracious God it is possible, because He demands it of those who would follow Jesus. Bonhoeffer says, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” He doesn’t bid us demand our rights. Indeed he forbids us to. “Love is patient and kind,” his apostle tells us; “love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Christians haven’t always met that description, but there was a time when we knew that it existed, which made it harder to avoid.

We are unlikely to act well until we think well; we are unlikely to think well until our will has undergone the proper discipline; and that discipline begins with proper instruction.

And he ends with the challenge of revisiting 1 Corinthians 13.

It is a hard medicine, the call to follow the way of Jesus.  But it is a medicine with deeper healing in mind than others you might find around.  And that healing might look and feel a little different on the inside than it does on the outside, which is where we often get ourselves into trouble, find ourselves distracted or disgruntled.  But it is there, and it is good.

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A Song of Self-Awareness

Posted on April 17, 2020 by awtraughber

One of the things I enjoy most about the music of Andy Gullahorn is that he is able to move between profundity and parody with ease.  A few weeks ago I posted a recording of “Light a Candle,” which definitely falls on the profounder side of things.  A few days ago, Gullahorn released a recording of one of his more humorous songs, on in line with “Skinny Jeans” and “Holy Flakes” and “Green Hills Mall.”  It’s called “Self-Awareness” or “The Enneagram Song.”

The Enneagram is something that I’ve not gotten into, though I have a number of friends and co-workers who refer to it often.  Like some many other personality handles, it is probably good as a tool but falls short of being a total short-hand for people.

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The Ground and the Figure in Our Current Moment

Posted on April 15, 2020 by awtraughber

There are a few technology writers that I both genuinely listen to and enjoy.  Nicholas Carr, writer of The Shallows, is one of them.  He recently did an interview concerning the place of analog in a post-pandemic world.  The site shared some of the interview in print.  It gives an interesting take on “the ground and the figure” in Our Current Moment: what do we perceive are actual reality versus what is the construct built on top of it.  Carr had this to say:

We’ve been getting very, very good at social distancing, you know, socializing without physical presence through our phones. And in many ways, that can seem like a kind of a narrowing of experience and a kind of a lessening of the richness of being part of society. I think that’s true.

On the other hand, in a time like this, a crisis like this, it’s actually very useful. What it underscores for us is that we’ve sort of had a reversion. If you think about the relationship of what we used to call the real world, you know, the physical world and the online world, it used to be that most of your time you spent in the physical world and then sometimes you sit down at your computer or whatever, you hook up to the Internet and you go online. I think one of the things that’s been underscored or highlighted by our experience with a pandemic is that relationship has switched, and now the real world, the physical world, is the place we kind of go to see now and then.

But really our main reality, I think, is the virtual world, the world we enter through our phones because we’re kind of constantly on them and doing all sorts of things through them. This experience is really emphasized. In fact, it’s kind of told to us, Oh, the physical world, that’s a dangerous place. You don’t spend a lot of time there. You don’t want to go out there. You’re going to get sick. It’s much, much better to just just stick with your phone and peer in that. So in a weird way, this has emphasized what I think is a fundamental shift and in the nature of what it means to be human.

It’s all connected, of course: the nature of humanity, the nature of the world around us, and what’s real in the first place.

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I turned 44 today.  It was a good day with some good opportunities to connect (an reconnect) with others.  And I had a good evening in the neighborhood eating amazing food and spending time around dear friends.  As the day ends, I am truly grateful.

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Ethics in Our Everyday

Posted on April 14, 2020 by awtraughber

Many of us are armchair warriors when it comes to talking about Our Current Moment.  We speculate much, opinionate often, and are likely to find ourselves recanting a comment when a new article is published or a new announcement is made.  The Moment is big and multifaceted like that.

The question of ethics is at the heart of some of the most difficult conversations these days.  Judgments of value and obligation, questions of utilitarianism and moral subjectivism.  Stanley Hauerwas, an ethicist I greatly respect, brought some ethical thought to bear today over at The Living Church.  In an essay titled “Ethics: The Everyday Matters,” he writes:

The virus has wounded us. Life was pretty good. Most of us knew when and from where our next meal or paycheck was coming. We could plan visits to see children or old friends. Spring training was soon to begin. If you cannot trust spring training you cannot trust anything. And that is exactly where we find ourselves. This damned virus has made us unsure if we can trust anything — and that includes God.

He then goes on to revisit some of his ethical thinking from a similar historical moment during the nuclear crisis of the 1980s, where he questioned what he calls a “totalitarian sentiment” of survival as an end in itself.  He continues:

What does this have to do with ethics? Even more importantly, what does this have to do with being Christian and our commitment to live in the light of God’s good care of us? I think this: Ethics is often thought to deal with “big questions” and dramatic choices, but in fact the most important and significant aspects of our lives are found in the everyday. The everyday is made the everyday by the promises we make, which may not seem like promises at the time but turn out to make us people that can be trusted. Such trust comes through small acts of tenderness that are as significant as they are unnoticed. It makes a difference that I am told, “I love you” before I leave for the day even though the declaration may seem to be routine. It is often routine and that is why it is so important.

The God that we worship as Christians is a God of the everyday. To be sure, the One that is Lord of time has acted and continues to act in ways that are extraordinary. But God does so that we might live lives shaped by the love found in the cross of Christ. Because of the cross we can have lives that contain the time necessary to sustain the everyday routines that make peace and justice possible. No routine is more significant than the willingness of the community called Christian to have and care for children, some of whom will be born “different.”

The kind of ethics associated with this way of characterizing the moral life is called an ethic of the virtues. A concentration on the virtues, an emphasis that characterized most ancient understandings of the moral life, was lost in modernity.

That last statement is true because every year I teach students who have little to no concept of the virtues.  The closest they get is the idea that “patience is a virtue,” but they aren’t quite sure why or how that connects to anything bigger.  His conclusion then, is sober and strong:

The wound that the virus has inflicted on us is to tempt us to become impatient with ourselves and others in an effort to return to the “normal.” We had not realized how dependent we have become on the everyday habit of going to church and seeing one another on Sundays. We had lost track of the significance of our willingness to touch one another as a sign that we rejoice in their presence. In short, we had lost the significance of the everyday, and we rightly want it back.

But we must be patient. We are an eschatological people. We believe we are agents in a story we did not make up and it is a story that is true. That the story is true makes it possible for us to live truthful lives. Such lives require us to recognize that we are a people who must die. We are not meant to survive this life. That is why we live not to survive but to be in love with God and those God makes our neighbor. We have been wounded by this virus but we have not been morally destroyed. So, let us be patient with one another as God has remained patient with us.

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