We are breathing in unprecedented times. The greatest fear reading the charts today is that I may turn into a statistic tomorrow. While God knows me by name, we may be rapidly reduced to merely a number on the dusty files of our government records. Of course, we have fallen short but where and how? Can this enormous loss ever be restored? In the pursuit of answers, we are cruelly pushed to the corner floundering with questions.

In 1990, the late pop star, George Michael, penned a song that stood out firmly. He wrote:

Cause God stopped keeping score.

I guess somewhere along the way
He must have let us all out to play.

Turned his back and all God’s children
Crept out the back door…

On a finite level we have lost count ourselves. The current disaster is in no way going to conclude today and disappear tomorrow, it is here to stay and while we walk through this path we live in the hope of a new Jerusalem.

One of the significant alterations over the past year has been the Lord’s Table. While many have improvised and offered the Eucharist over the Internet (it truly isn’t a communion when people are not present and do not commune with one another). The church ceases to exist when God’s children do not unite at the table. Rather with the altar being shifted from the existing sanctuary to our own homes, the Lords table has taken a new reference altogether. Especially so when we have shared our five loaves and two fishes with those whose tables were empty. That for me, would be a keen demonstration of the Word becoming flesh. As long as we broke bread and partook of the wine within the precincts of the Church walls, we were content in our own spiritual self-sufficiency and had Jesus exclusively to ourselves. The crisis has forced us to become inclusive by taking the Table to those who have none. It took an invisible force to activate a visible demonstration of love. Only a calamity of such immense proportions can cause us to function like this. Jesus broke bread in the face of impending death, a cruel one too, a path that led to the cross. We are to follow the same, in the face of alarming loss we are to become the broken bread for the hungry and dying realm outside. This for me, has been the transformative purpose of the church. What no earthly power, or board or committee or priest or bishop could do the church has done by becoming the broken bread to the world around her. We may have shut services, but we have not stopped serving.

For the few months the church had reopened there was a surge in church attendance. People are desperately looking for hope, we have lost faith in employment because our jobs won’t give it to us, they have shut down. Educational institutions have been locked for over a year now. We step out on the streets with trepidation and much unease. George Floyd’s dying words, ‘I can’t breathe’,  has also become ours today because life is denying us the freedom of being human, depriving us of air, choking our need to survive freely. This woefully has become the disorder of the planet today, where ‘I can’t breathe’ is our universal worldwide slogan, and we are not sure what it is to be human anymore.

Did God send the virus to wake us? Let me caution you not to be quick to answer life’s big questions. It is dangerous to demonize God, let God be God. Nevertheless, the virus has certainly woken us up. We have learned to express love to those outside the church, especially our brothers and sisters from other faiths, in sober ways unheard of before.

Psalm 126:1 tells us ‘When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.’ Which means our pain has an expiry date, God knows when, He has a sequence and a structure. His eye is on the clock and He knows how our stories will end, if His eye is on the sparrow surely it is on ours too. As we walk through unchartered territory groping our way in the darkness may I leave you with a word of hope, that even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet the valley will not walk through me.

– Ps. Anand Peacock