In these times of COVID-19, here is some perspective – a bigger picture – that can ease the burden.
First, let’s look at what C.S. Lewis said about calamity in a sermon he preached in 1939 in the early stages of War World II:
“I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective, The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal…”
And, here are some excerpts from a sermon by British Methodist Preacher W.E. Sangster (1900 – 1959):
“If sin had never spoiled this fair earth … if men had always done the perfect will of God … if our poor race had responded at every stage to the leading of the loving Father, . . . anything might have happened then. Perhaps there would have been no need of sympathy in such a world. Perhaps character would have grown without discipline. Perhaps love would never have been linked with pain.”
[…]
“What happens to the guidance of God when calamity comes? Calamity isn’t always the outcome of obvious sin. It overtakes the saints. Untimely death has nipped the life of the noblest souls, and not death merely, but death through agonizing pain. Thomas Arnold, the great headmaster, the friend of God and of boyhood, struck down at forty-seven with angina pectoris. F. W. Robertson, fearless thinker and friend of the working man, passed out at thirty-seven with a terrible abscess in the cerebellum. Henry Drummond, whom Ian Maclaren called “the most perfect Christian I have known or expect to see this side of the grave,” died at the age of forty-six after two years on his back in pain. Nor is that the problem at its worst. Hardly a year passes but some great disaster stuns the public mind: the Tay Bridge disaster; the ramming of the Victoria-, the loss of the Titanic; the wreck of the R 101. No easy answer leaps to our lips. The man who finds in all such disasters the judgment of God on a wicked people is both un- convincing and inhuman. Choice souls perish in such an hour, and these calamities visit a thrifty and industrious people as well as a profligate and frivolous one. Disaster, like the rain, falls on the just and the unjust. The horror of it strikes one dumb, and when speech returns, a tempest of questions rises to the lips. Does God guide us? Is there knowledge in the Most High? Does he lead us to the lip of a calamity and leave us to fall in? The problem demands an attempt at an answer because any day might thrust it on our notice again and because it challenges faith. If anguish comes, can doubt be far behind?”
[…]
“Guidance does not end when calamity begins. In every situation he meets us and out of every situation he can lead us to a greener pasture and a sphere of wider use. We can trust Him in whom we have believed.
But when calamity has us in its grip, even this strong thought is not enough of itself. We look the ugly intruder in the face, feel its power to steal the joy from half our life, and cast our querulous inquiries at God, demanding to know why it had to be. In that hour the safeguarding of our freedom doesn’t seem enough. In our bewilderment we feel that a loving God would find effective discipline some easier way. We look at him through mists of tears and wonder if, in his greatness, he really feels our woe. Then it is that our Lord comes and shows us his feet, his hands, his side, and if there were a tongue in every wound of Jesus, we know what it would say: “I have suffered!” Then it is that we feel with ‘Emerson how nigh is grandeur to our dust, how near is God to man. He has suffered. He does not simply reign in some far-off splendor, untroubled by our woe.”
Finally, some words from Kevin L. Anderson, Ph.D., written in May, 2020, as COVID-19 has affected nearly every human on the planet…
“These are both challenging and exciting times. The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us, once again, that we live in a fallen and broken world. A world cursed by our sins. The pandemic has also reminded us that God (not sports, movies, or government policies) sustains us.”
