A time to learn
One year on from the start of the pandemic in Ireland, David Cupples reflects back over the seasons of Covid-19. 18
Herald Spring 2021
“A
ll things are yours.” So writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:21. “Whether…the world or life or death or the present or the future – all are yours.” ‘All things’ means the past year of Covid-19 is ours. What on earth might that mean? How might knowing God make the strange experience of the last year mine, personally and spiritually, in the sense Paul means? First it means receiving everything as a gift from God. Ultimately everything that comes to us comes from his Fatherly hand. Since God is for us, all is given for our good. How then should we work with God’s gracious purpose? “Nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the Word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:4). It is both universally human and specifically godly to try to make sense of our experience. Here is a personal, prayerful attempt to sanctify, with the Word of God and prayer, this last year; to discern how we might have met God in its bizarre mix of the pleasant and painful, the liberating and the limiting, the worrying and the wonderful, the sadly missed routines and the surprising new opportunities. The secular, atheistic mindset sees all experience as nothing but one huge formless mishmash of sensations on which we impose our ‘social constructs’ or individual meaning; it also wants to iron out all differences and distinctions since the world has no objective order. The biblical worldview, in contrast, sees life within a divine order, a framework; and one hallmark of this is a recognition of distinctions, differences and opposites. The creation story is about God creating distinctions within a unified order. One of these distinctions is the seasons of the year. My journey with the Lord through the pandemic has paralleled these seasons. In Ecclesiastes 3 the writer reflects on how there is a “season for every activity under heaven.” I don’t think he is being prescriptive – saying there is a right time to do these things, but rather descriptive – these are the diverse experiences of life through which God brings us in this world. Ecclesiastes says it isn’t possible to understand the pattern and purpose of everything that happens.
