This Christmas, can we find it in our hearts to thank God for COVID? Some days it is a complete act of the will to say things like this, but should you need help in finding the right “angle” for your prayer, the book of Jeremiah can help.
Jeremiah writes to the Israelites, who were exiled for 70 years in Babylon. No doubt they were feeling aimless and dejected as they were far from their place of worship, their customs, and everything that was familiar to them. They were physical exiles, but we, the people of COVID, may feel like emotional exiles.
We are still far from the normal we were promised. With each passing day, politicians continue to make a sport of moving the goalposts and creating more absurd, unscientific rules that are not dictated by health officials but by public opinion. Mandates, passports, fourth, fifth, sixth boosters … these things aren’t going away any time soon.
If you are a student of history, you know that a government cannot “care” for the most vulnerable. Consult every ancient empire. Government usually swells with a megalomaniac at the helm and then implodes. It has never been the government’s job to love us and care for our flourishing. Its job is to get bigger and more powerful. Individual people care for individual people, on a good day. Government bodies preserve themselves and their investments.
But Jeremiah restores our focus: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart.”
In the midst of the world’s anxiety and confusion, we Christians have been doing lots of learning about ourselves and what actual trust looks like. We have always been weak and vulnerable, but now we know it acutely. We have always been judgmental, suspicious, and cruel, but now we can see it in the daylight (or in the YouTube comments). Most importantly, we have always needed a saviour and now we know it in the deepest part of our heart. Maybe this Christmas we will allow ourselves to feel needy, to feel as though there is no hope outside of Jesus. Because truly there isn’t.
The world indeed has plans for us, but these plans are dead and lifeless, and it would not be good for us to look into them too much. The plans of the world are certainly not to prosper us. But this is almost irrelevant if our life is rooted in Christ.
The book of James could not be more direct on how to conduct ourselves during this time of exile. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
You don’t have to look too far today to find an orphan or widow, or someone who has been systemically overlooked and forgotten by all. It is much harder for the world to poison you when your hands and heart are busy trying to show someone else that indeed the future is full of hope. Thank you God for COVID. Thank you, Father, for helping us to return to worship and for showing us the proper order of things.
