The past three months have been intense at my house. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, the semester was a challenging one to begin with: teaching full time for the first time in nearly a decade, including teaching a new class and one that is very familiar but that I hadn’t taught in since spring of 2013. Then I got the flu followed, as one might expect, by my husband getting the flu. We didn’t get tested, but we know influenza A was going around the community at the time, and our symptoms were classic influenza, including a couple of weeks of being wiped out. So if you wondered why I quit posting after mid-February, there’s your first answer. 

Of course, you are all familiar at some level with part of what happened next. As I finished recovering physically and began to get fully caught up with work over Spring Break, the new coronavirus started impacting our lives. I had an extra week of break in order to prepare for teaching my courses online. As someone who had never taught online before, I was grateful for the extra week of preparation, but I also greatly regretted the loss of class time as I worked to cram the necessary material into an already crowded final six weeks of the semester without overburdening students.

I had been told many times that teaching online takes more effort and more time than teaching face to face. I pretty much believed it, but now I truly know that it is true. In the struggle to give my students what they needed and fulfill the other essential responsibilities I had, many things fell to the wayside, including this blog. My memorization program tells me that I have 155 verses to review at present (after reviewing James 2:12-26 earlier today). The resolution about serious weekly Bible study will get resurrected later this week. I have watched my church’s online services. I’ve kept up with my daily Bible reading. I’ve fed my family. I’ve had weekly calls with my parents and sons. I’ve mourned my cat, who died just as this was all starting. Beyond that, my life has been too much news and work, lots of work.

As hard as the past weeks have been, I’ve been grateful. My family is richly blessed in this circumstance. I’m not thrilled about having to teach from home, but I can do it. My husband usually works from home. Only one of our close family members was furloughed from her job, and she and her husband are fine financially. As I watch the world around me, I have been tempted to envy those with extra time on their hands, but I am mostly moved by the pain I see in those who have been directly impacted by this virus as well as those who have suffered due to the shutdowns.

Having submitted the semester’s grades and looking at a far reduced workload for the next few months, I find myself with time, at last, to look around and ask what my role as a Christ-follower is in this current crisis. Part of that role is easy to see. People are suffering, both from the virus itself and from the resulting economic impact. As believers, we are to give to those in need. 

I think there are other roles that we have in our current circumstance. One of those is the role of truth seeker. When we were told that the truth would set us free, Jesus was primarily talking of himself as that truth. At the same time, we know that God is the creator of the universe we live in and that his word is true. Therefore, we can be assured that actual scientific fact can never contradict God’s truth. Scientific theory can. We can misunderstand either the Bible or the facts. However, the reality is that the Truth and the facts cannot be in disagreement, and I believe that gives me as a child of God the responsibility to seek a better understanding of both the facts and God’s truth as I walk through every situation in life, including our current circumstances.

As we seek and disseminate truth, however, we must never forget another of our roles. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God,” (Matthew 6:9 ESV). Just as we are told to share our faith with “gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15 ESV), I believe that we need to display that gentleness in other areas of our lives. Gentleness is, after all, one of the fruits of the spirit. There are deeply committed Christians with many different beliefs about the virus and different responses to it, just as there non-Christians with a variety of such beliefs. What should distinguish those of us who are believers is how we express our views and how we treat those who disagree with us. Let us, as Christians, be known by our love, our gentleness, our concern and respect for others, and our hunger for truth.

This is a hard time for most of us in this world. How are you coping, and how are you seeking God in this challenge?