When God engineered the incipient foundations of a global redemption, he wanted it established in the place of ethnic, linguistic, and social diversity–Galilee. He wanted his Middle Eastern disciples not to forget the Greek and Roman foreigners. Three times in Matthew, we are clearly told that Jesus wanted to appear to the disciples in Galilee collectively (Mt. 28:7, 10, 16). He had a plan.
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It is pretty clear that kids seem to be more at risk to things beyond COVID-19. The psychological and emotional fallout from a face-covering order is something we are not talking about. Additionally, there is something very important that we are NOT teaching our kids. The new at-risk population is children, not only the medically vulnerable kids, but all children. Here is my reasoning and here are some things we are not currently doing.
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When we SEE the power of a living Christ, then we fear the God of action and creation. We experience the deliverance ourselves and rejoice in the salvation of the collective church. The qualitative difference in divine action removes all doubt and we ‘believe the Lord’ (Ex. 14:31). Praise and worship follow that salvation (Ex. 15), that deliverance, that sand-under-our-sandals reality. God shows up, just in time. Our enemies are dead on the shore. We can move on in freedom. Seeing is, in fact, believing.
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Restrained liberty is not something we are good at. Yet, it is mandated in the scripture. How do we fight social and racial injustice if we do not exercise liberties to win equality? How do we not yield individual liberties, if we are forced to live health-care directives that may not be advisable in all situations?
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In the Civil War South, the economic foundations of slavery and the desire for State’s rights, resulted in decisions that placed economics before human values. They refused to address moral corruption to preserve financial stability, for in fact in the Southern mind, no federal government was going to tell local economies how to run their plantation businesses.
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The current state of progress in our social crisis is hard to evaluate, being caught between the tension of an ever-mounting death toll, now exceeding 60,000 souls, and the need to reopen the economy. The tension between restrained civil liberties and the right of elderly and vulnerable people to be protected is not an easy decision.
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We are hearing lately about ‘herd immunity’ as a preventative or a projectible outcome of properly managing COVID. Might this be a Darwinian social experiment? First of all, human beings are not simply animals. We are not a ‘herd.’
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We never want to be associated with the Levite and the Priest who stepped over the wounded traveler on the Road to Jericho. It might be important at this point to go the costly and slow route of putting the sick man on our donkey and carrying him to the inn like the Good Samaritan. We never want to get to the point where we let the disease-spread escalate and force people to languish outside of hospitals without beds and we figuratively step over them to keep on going about our jobs. Surely there is a balance here somewhere.
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Here are some articles that might interest anyone wanting to do humble engagement with people when they communicate. Moody is one of my lifelong heroes, a man who acted with directness and simplicity and who wanted to educate young people in the scriptures with power.
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It is not hard to be authentic, at least in theory. We intentionally cover up the authenticity with the plastic, hoping that no one sees the flawed me. In reality, that is what people are looking for. “Oh, Dan is broken too. Maybe there is hope for me.”
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