In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote about learning to lead worship during COVID-19. Two years on I am still learning. Maybe you are too. I hope these brief reflections can at least make you feel less alone, and hopefully encourage you to keep going…
I believe that hard things do not change us as much as they expose us. And our hearts and lives have been exposed by COVID-19 in ways that many of us have previously been able to avoid or ignore.
What do we value?
Whose lives matter?
Are masks a sign of fear, and going maskless a sign of faith?
Are vaccines helpful and useful, or reckless and untested?
Are there only ever two sides and two options?
Is everything black or white?
What is selfish and self-serving, what is foolish and careless?
Can I be friends with people who think and believe differently than me, or must we now become enemies?
Are we going to be discipled by culture and politics or by the Gospel?
The ugliness of my heart has been exposed in the pandemic: my tendency to judge other people, other followers of Jesus against myself and my own decisions. To look for specs through a log.
When I am attentive to the conviction of the Holy Spirit within rather than an outward condemnation of the pharisee within, I can see these places of friction as opportunities for repentance and prayer.
If we are willing these are opportunities for iron to sharpen iron. For the Church to truly be what we already are - one people, one body, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language. This is an opportunity for us to image to the world our unity not through ideology, politics, or socioeconomic brackets, but by the unifying blood of Jesus.
This truly could be an opportunity to display the beauty of the Gospel.
To make obvious our adoption as sons and daughters of God.
My prayer as I look out on the faces of the congregation,
as I run into people as they stumble over why they have not been serving or attending,
as I field questions about why we are doing this, and why we are not doing that,
as we wrestle with what it looks like to love and honor God and care well for His people,
as we stumble forward,
and as I become more aware of my own sin, is:
God give me Your eyes to see these people. Let me grieve over my sin more than over the differences of my brothers and sisters. Keep me close to You, and tender toward especially those who are loud, vocal, and combative in the opposite direction from my own convictions. Give me the compassion of Christ, who ‘When He saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’ (Matthew 9:36).
May our divisions be an opportunity for repentance. May our divisions turn us to Christ, the One who has torn down the dividing wall of hostility between God and man, who has reconciled us to become people of reconciliation, who has comforted us to be people of comfort. Amen and amen.