What began as every introvert’s dream-come-true (“Hey, everybody stay home for a few weeks.”) has turned into an unsettling episode of a TV show that none of us wanted to watch (even the introverts). As COVID-19 rampages across the globe, disrespectful of life and liberty alike, we’re sitting in our homes wondering how long it’s going to take, hoping it won’t touch any of us personally.
Honestly, there’s plenty to be scared of—I don’t even have to tell you that, the news is doing just fine. At the root of our fear lingers the same gnawing realization: we just don’t know. Could be a week. Could be a month. Could be six months or a year. Could be more.
We’re off our routine, jolted into a new regular, trying to take things in stride. It’s serious, so serious, because everything that involves human life is serious. So serious.
It can be easy to lose sight of truth and good some days, when life seems to have swung off its hinges—but all is not lost.
Here are two important things to remember every day when we turn on the news and the first word we hear is “Coronavirus.”
1. There are still other things happening in the world. Babies are being born, people are falling in love (even from > 6' apart), children are learning the magic of walking and talking, scholars are studying and making new discoveries, and so much more. The precious gifts of life and discovery are still ours, even if they’re momentarily not our main focus. But someday, we’ll wake up and the sun will be shining and the birds will be singing, and the shelves will be fully stocked with toilet paper again. And we’ll sit up in bed and take a deep breath, and sing for joy at the gift of life.
2. We always fight. Humans are this strange, unique, beautiful thing—where every other force on earth believes “reason” and will give up when things get really, really impossible, we always fight back. We’re humans. It’s what we do*.
In my last post of 2016 (check it out here if you want to read the whole thing), I wrote about this, and (if I do say so myself) summed it up pretty well:
Over our Christmas break, we went to see Rogue One. Critique of the actual film aside (it was decent, but there was minimal character development, which was a bummer), there were at least a half-dozen previews before the feature film began. Almost every single one was about humans fighting aliens, humans fighting super-villians, humans fighting crime, humans fighting other-worldly forces, but always, humans fighting.
I had an epiphany: everything fights humanity.
Because we fight back.
We fight crime, we fight things that are bigger than us, we fight hurricanes and earthquakes and fire, we set ourselves up against insurmountable odds. We do it without question, because it's what we do (like eating and sleeping and hitting snooze).
We live in a world that is littered, left and right, with the evidence of sin trying to win, but we haven't given up. We fight because we are not programmed to back down, because we believe that there is good and it is worth fighting for. We fight because Jesus Christ fought first, fought the urge to choose the easy route, and gave himself be brutally murdered so that we are not doomed to losing eternally.
Humans are the chosen enemy of every fictitious and fantastical world, because we are the only ones who will oppose them, who will stand and deliver in the face of impossibility, who will get knocked down and get up, again and again and again. Humanity is, to the avid warrior, the best opponent, because the human spirit exhibits unquenchable resilience in the face of insurmountable odds.
We keep on fighting. Because even when the tunnel is caving in, even when it's dark outside and the stars can't make it through, we cannot just give up. We have to keep trying, even if the victories are infinitesimal, even if it's one step forward, five steps back.
I'm not given to profanity, but 2016 was a h-e-double-hockey-sticks of a year for a lot of people. Really, every year is. But it was also full of hope, redemption, and little kindnesses.
And God was gracious, and let us live in His green world, day after day.
2017 might be a piece of cake. Or it might be even worse. History proves that every year has the bitter and the sweet, intermingled throughout.
Either way, we'll keep fighting for the better, fighting because God made us to be full of courage, not fear. We fight because the landscape of eternity is much larger than we can even imagine, but what we do still matters.
We are fighters, and even after a year that knocks our wind out, we'll take a deep breath and surge into the next one.
It will be delightful, and there will be delicious moments and snapshots we'll treasure forever.
It will be brutal, and sometimes we will wish to crawl into a large cave and hide forever.
It will be 2017, and we will fight to live it better than we lived 2016.
We’re humans. It's what we do.
*Maybe it’s because we’re created in the image of God, and He first modeled stopping at NOTHING to get what was the most important to Him: us.