Today I have a guest writer, Dr. Todd Bowman. I knew him when I served as a children’s pastor and he was a young teen. He now is an Associate Professor of Counseling at Indiana Wesleyan University. He shared this post today and I found it to be a wonderful word of encouragement!
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Deuteronomy 4:9 “But take care, as you value your lives! Do not forget the things which you yourselves have seen, or let them slip from your heart as long as you live; teach them, rather, to your children and to your children’s children.”
Perspective is an interesting thing. I was out of the country when 9/11 happened, and when I returned home, it was easy to see that we were living in a new era. Things I had never experienced in the US, like soldiers with machine guns inside the airport, welcomed me back. And last week, 10 minutes into our flight to London, the world turned on its head again with the announcement of shutting down travel from Europe, and a few days later, the UK. As we scrambled through DFW airport last night, there was both an eerie silence in this typically bustling place of commerce, a crypt masquerading as a market, and what I would describe as a spirit of panic in the air.
I have long made the claim that “anxiety is contagious”, and this truth has never been more tangible in my experience of it than last night. In the screening line, in customs, on the train, at the gate. Even knowing this and being able to recognize it for what it was, I felt tension leak into my body and the tentacles of worry begin to squeeze my thoughts. Not helping matters were the 10-hour flight we had just completed and the fact that our bodies were well into the night London time, even though it was 7:30 in Dallas. I felt pretty helpless, for the first time in a long time.
This vulnerable state sparked a familiar, although not fully volitional, response: prayer. And as I prayed, I remembered, and as I remembered the fear lessened and my mind was focused and my body was calm.
My prayer for the coming days and weeks is that the same sense of unified harmony and crossing the aisle on behalf of others that permeated the landscape in those dark days of 2001 will not have been lost in our collective imagination to the years that have transpired, but will rather be rekindled for our children who do not have an experiential understanding of what it means to unite in times of crisis as a country, as a community, as a family.
As messages about washing our hands, maintaining appropriate social distance, staying inside to help the medical community prioritize care for those who need it, and not hoarding goods or panic buying so there is enough for others continue to permeate electronic billboards and social media, we see the same spirit from Deut. 4, “Take care, as you value your lives!”
We are striving to value life quite a bit right now. Some do this for themselves, at the expense of others; some of us for the sake of others, an act of charity toward the end of warding off the contagion of terror that exists among us these days. After all, perfect love drives out fear. And we will continue in this spirit of charity until this current moment of existential crisis has been navigated, because this is not the first moment like this we have endured as a human race, and it will certainly not be the last.
In this space, whatever it may entail for you, my challenge and invitation to us all is to live fully into the second part of this passage: “do not forget what you have seen and do not let them slip from your heart.” In the moments of isolation in quarantine, the moments of fear of what may come next, the moments of uncertainty, the moments of grief, the moments of confusion, the moments where the worst parts of us can be awakened and threaten to guide our thoughts and actions, in those moments, and in every moment, may we remember and may we persist in the sharing of the stories from our lives with one another that relay the bigness of God, the transforming power of grace in our lives, and how the full embrace of suffering produces perseverance, character, hope and may we rest in the promise that our Hope does not disappoint.
Do not forget. We promised a generation of heroes not long ago that we would never forget. Rather than remembering them with parades and memorials today, let us celebrate their sacrificial spirit by emulating it in all we do with and for one another. You are thought of more than you realize, and loved far more than you know.
Mar 18th, 2020, Wed
