“Why doesn’t your guy Trump get off his butt and take care of this virus thing? With all our science this should be a piece of cake! What is his problem? He just wants to help the rich!”

         I read the e-mail with some disbelief. My mind went to the sender, an old ‘friend.’ ‘Wow, did we really go to the same high school? How can you even think like that, Dude?’ There are several things wrong in those four sentences. First, the president isn’t ‘my guy.’ I voted for him in the general election because Ted Cruz, a Christian whose morality and Christian outlook I admire, lost in the primaries. Second, the president is doing all he can do, and more than most would do, to halt this thing. It would scare me to see this president, or any president of my life time, emerge from a lab in a white coat where he was working to find a cure. Third, the cure. Science has never found a cure for a virus. They will eventually come up with a vaccine, but a vaccine is not a cure. It will provide an immunity of sorts if you have not already gotten the virus, at least until the virus mutates. This is why there are flu shots every year. Some viruses are talented little fellows. And fourth, being rich, or poor, has nothing to do with anything.

         But, like a lot of people, my old ‘friend’ gets his information from the media. The media wants to place blame. The president is disliked by the media, so they find ways to blame him. Of course, it wouldn’t matter who the president was, this virus would exist and would be affecting the entire country, just as it is now.

         Maybe it is human nature to always place blame. Having been in the ministry for 44 years, I have heard people place blame for a lot of things. Any church that has ever had a long lasting problem can place the beginning of the problem back to a single pastor or one or two members who wanted to control everything. During the years when I was working with churches in crisis situations, I met with a particular congregation. Their problem went back to a pastor who had been there 15 years before and had started them on their downward path. It was all his fault. He wasn’t right for the church. He had an agenda. He certainly wasn’t a Spiritual leader. He was to blame. One man was telling me the story, but everyone else was nodding their heads in agreement. I listened to them. It was their story and it would have been rude to interrupt. When the blame game ended, I asked a question.

         “So, how did this man come to be your pastor?” “Uh, what do you mean?” “I mean, how did this man come to be your pastor?” “Well, in the usual way. We were looking for a pastor and we got his resume and, well, one thing led to another and we called him as pastor.” “Oh, OK. Why did you call him as your pastor?” “What? Well, we didn’t know he was going to be like that. We thought he was a real Spiritual guy. Good preacher and all.” “Oh, OK. So, did you pray about it before you issued the call?” “Well, of course we did!” “OK, so you sought out God’s leadership. Therefore, either this pastor was so clever that he had God fooled OR, this congregation was not Spiritual enough to simply commune with God. Now we know the pastor didn’t fool God, so that makes you, as a congregation, completely at fault.”

         The meeting ended shortly thereafter. In the car, Marsha said, “It is amazing any church ever calls on you for help.”

         The point is, when we seek to place blame, we either blame someone else or we blame God or we blame whatever. We almost never blame ourselves, even when it is obvious. And sometimes, there is no blame to place.

         Take our current situation. How can you blame any person because an unknown virus has emerged? The story I read is that a man at a market in Wuhon, China bought some bats to make bat soup. (I have never seen that in a Chinese restaurant, but it does sound tasty.) One of the bats had the virus, which had never been transferred to humans before. But the virus had mutated. The bat eater got the virus and, boom, the virus shut down the world. The bat wasn’t at fault. The bat eater wasn’t at fault. No one was at fault because it had never emerged before. Of course, none of that may be true, in which case it was the president’s fault. Good thinking. But if it wasn’t anyone’s fault then God must be at fault.

Except, we were told things like this would happen. We were told there would be disease and war and all manner of bad things, but that does not mean the end is here. These are things that will just happen. Man sinned and grief came into the world, but not everything that happens that is bad is a judgment of God.

SOMETIMES, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

So, where are we with COVID-19?

Families are spending more time together with fewer distractions. It really isn’t important that there are no sports on TV or on the local fields. It really isn’t a big deal that the family has to eat at home. It really could be habit forming to touch base with loved ones. Is all this ‘shelter in place’ stuff so bad? Even the ‘stay at home’ from church isn’t so bad. God needs to be lifted up at home before lifting Him up at church can have an impact. Maybe we could get to the point of the psalmist in Psalm 63:

O God, You are my God; earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for You;
my flesh faints for You, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
 So I have looked upon You in the sanctuary, beholding Your power and glory.

 Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You.
 So I will bless You as long as I live; in Your name I will lift up my hands.

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise You with joyful lips, when I remember You upon my bed, and meditate on You in the watches of the night;  for You have been my help,
and in the shadow of Your wings I will sing for joy.
My soul clings to You; Your right hand upholds me.

But those who seek to destroy my life  shall go down into the depths of the earth;  they shall be given over to the power of the sword; they shall be a portion for jackals.
But the king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult, for the mouths of liars will be stopped.

         Wouldn’t it be amazing if all this brought us to the point that this psalmist had arrived at? Maybe this whole thing isn’t so bad.

         Blessings and joys as we approach the Resurrection of our Lord.