When writing this article, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, I wondered about how to begin.
The most likely of phrases would probably have been: ‘What a crazy time we live in.’
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However, as I began thinking about it, I realised that these times are not so different from other times experienced by generations before us.
Feelings of confusion, fear and loneliness are not unique to us who are alive in 2020.
Nor are those feelings unique to just one generation – we all experience them.
But rather than feeling despair at realising that we are not so different after all, I choose to rejoice in it.
How amazing is this opportunity we have today just to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau said: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”
Perhaps these times we are experiencing is our wake-up call.
Not a call to work even harder than before, but to realise the things worth being awake for.
Perhaps to realise the things generations before us had to realise.
This takes me back to the teachings of Jesus in John 14:15-17.
Jesus wants to teach His disciples about something they have never learned before – how they will learn to know God (verse 17).
This ‘to know’ is something much deeper than just knowledge about God.
The Greek word literally means: ‘… it is knowing something because of an experience that allows you to intimately and personally know it’.
Jesus taught His disciples that God is not far away, but that they can know God – know God intimately and personally.
We, therefore, can never be without the presence of God. We can never wake to a day God has not created.
If Thoreau’s words are true that the day only dawns to those who choose to be awake. I choose to wake to a day created by God.
I choose to live the day as God has created this single day as an opportunity to know Him more intimately and more personally.
Perhaps this is the hard-learned lesson mankind so easily forgets.
We choose to wake up in order to go on with our passive lives.
We do the same thing over, and over, and over again, forgetting why we started doing it in the first place.
It is only when we are shocked into a new way of living that we start realising our reasons for being awake – our families, our children, our pets…the things we love and the things we know.
We do not know what the future holds, but we do know this: that God knows us and therefore we can also know God and each other.
We are not alone.
Not if we choose to awake to a brilliant new day created by a God who loves us so we may love each other.
We are bound together by this crisis in one common destiny. May the aftermath bring new opportunities for standing together.
(Submitted by NG Margate)
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