Love in the Time of Coronavirus

When this plague has passed, what will our neighbors remember of us? Will they remember that the Christians took immediate, decisive action to protect the vulnerable, even at great personal and organizational cost? Will they remember that, being prepared and free from panic, the households of their Christian neighbors were able to visit the needy (

We can reclaim the household as the fundamental unit of personhood, the place where we all are best known and cared for.

We should not say to fearful people, “You’re overreacting.”

It is absolutely true that people immersed in media of any kind react to news and rumors in unhelpful ways. But meeting anxiety with an accusation of overreacting is not likely to help. The biggest problem in most of the United States as I write is that many people, and many institutions, a

What is your only hope in life and death?

That I am not my own,

but belong with body and soul,

both in life and in death,

to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins

with his precious blood,

and has set me free

from all the power of the devil.

He also preserves me in such a way

that without the will of my heavenly Father

not a hair

Most of all, while government at all levels can enforce a certain amount of behavior change, for example through quarantines and “lockdowns,” it is almost impossible for coercive authority to increase people’s capacity for love and service to others.

Shaping culture is a matter of changing “the horizons of possibility.”

At this extraordinary moment, local leaders — people who lead groups of 10 to 1,000 people — have perhaps the greatest opportunity to shape culture in the United States that they have ever had.

This means that all of us have a primary responsibility as leaders, as far as it depends on us, to be well-rested, soaked in prayer and contemplation, and free of personal fear and anxiety. We need to start and end each day as children of our heavenly Father, friends of Jesus, and grateful recipients of the Holy Spirit. We need to pray for genuine

There is no reason to expect COVID-19 to be the “end of the world” in any sense. Instead it falls in the large category of events that Jesus also prepared his disciples for, the “wars and rumors of wars” that would not mean the end of the world (Matthew 24:6)