Reading Time: 2 minutes

I had something else planned for the blog this week, but it’ll have to wait until sometime later. When a little bug can cripple the world’s economy, cancel professional sports and even March Madness, it demands a response. Here’s mine.

The COVID-19 coronavirus is real and so is the pandemic that is growing as a result. People who were already at risk due to other health conditions are being pushed into eternity as a result of it, and we should take seriously the warnings and the wisdom given to us by experts.

But as followers of Jesus, we can’t allow a pandemic to lead us into pandemonium, and yet it seems that this is exactly what is happening! I don’t say this because churches are canceling normal worship services – there may very well be wisdom in doing that and our church may end up doing the same (although we’re ON for this Sunday, March 15).

[Tweet “As followers of Jesus, we can’t allow a pandemic to lead us into pandemonium.”]

The question is what will we do instead? Hide away in our homes? Practice social distancing from the very people who need us to draw near? Bubble wrap our kids? Our faith?

Please. This is the time for the church to rise up and serve the hurting. To offer comfort and hope to people who only know fear and panic.

[Tweet “This is the time for the church to rise up and serve the hurting.”]

I think of the church’s response to other plagues throughout history. During the Antonine Plague, 2,000 people were dying daily and the mortality rate was 25%. Yet it was the Christians who cared for the sick and dying, often dying themselves as a result. A century later, during the Plague of Cyprian in which up to 5,000 people were dying EVERY DAY, it was once again the followers of Jesus who cared for the infected and then died infected.

It isn’t how we worship during a comfortable “worship experience” that causes the culture to take notice. It’s how we serve in the uncomfortable “suffering experience” that does. This is why the early church prospered and grew. This is why numbers were added to the church daily. And now, in 2020, the church has another opportunity to “take up our cross and follow Him” in laying down our comforts, rights, and possibly even our lives in our service of the Father and others.

[Tweet “It isn’t how we worship during a comfortable “worship experience” that causes the culture to take notice. It’s how we serve in the uncomfortable “suffering experience” that does.”]

By all means, wash your hands. Blow your nose into a tissue and cough into your arm. But for the sake of the gospel, don’t retreat in fear to the comfort of your home. Step into the light and BE the light. As you do, you’ll kill off the one virus that is more contagious that the coronavirus, because fear is only viral if it has a carrier.

Refuse to carry it. Pick up peace instead, and carry it to everyone, everywhere.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

This past Sunday was just an ordinary day. I got up early, spent time with Jesus, and then went to church to hang out with a bunch of awesome people and talk with them about Jesus. Lunch afterward with more conversations and then finally, home.

Sunday afternoons in our house are pretty similar week to week: I update the podcast and work on some of the post-production of the message video while the B99 naps. Yes, she loves that it works out that way! This week followed the same script until she got up and greeted me with, “Did you hear about Kobe Bryant?”

The B99 is actually pretty current on popular athlete names, but if I was compiling a list of the Top 100 questions Wendy would ask me after an afternoon nap, that one isn’t on it.

“No.”

“He died in a helicopter crash.”

We turned on YouTube TV and spent 20 minutes or so watching the same footage of smoke rising from a hillside over and over and over again.

I could have cried. Maybe I did. I felt an overwhelming sense that I had lost something and yet, I didn’t. Did I? I’ve spent the better part of the week wondering about that. Wondering why the death of someone I’ve never met could affect me so deeply? Why so many others were feeling the same way about the same person that they’d never met, either? Why a kid wearing #24 and hitting the game-winning shot could cause such a massive eruption of cathartic cheering in a gym full of people who didn’t know the Laker who wore that number?

As I slipped out the door early this morning for a quick 4-mile run, I’m not sure I was any closer to the answers to those questions. I think I actually had more to ask. What allows us to be so close to death that we are shaken and yet just as quickly return to lives as normal? How can we live each day as if it’s our last without being overwhelmingly morbid? I mean, come on. If this was my last day, I’d be hugging my family and never letting go. No school. No work. No ministry. Just one long, increasingly awkward group hug.

But then it happened. Toward the end of my run, I heard a familiar voice in my AirPods. It was TobyMac and he was singing “21 years” – a song he wrote as he wrestled with the death of his son, Truett. It’s a song full of questions – more questions than answers – and the last 2 lines hit me hard:

God has you in heaven
But I have you in my heart

Why does death affect us so deeply? Because it hits us in the heart and in the process reveals something in our hearts that we often try to ignore: eternity.

Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.

(Ecclesiastes 3:11; emphasis mine)

Death reminds us that we have a time that is our own time, a period of days, weeks, months, and years in which we have to come to grips with eternity. And death reminds us that all of that is bigger than any one of us: famous athletes, aspiring rappers, or the 151,600 other mostly unknown people who will die around the world today.

Life is a gift, but death can be, too, especially when it reminds us that we only have a limited time to deal with the fact that we only have limited time.

[Tweet “Life is a gift, but death can be, too, especially when it reminds us that we only have a limited time to deal with the fact that we only have limited time.”]

I hurt for TobyMac and his family and I’ve never met them. I hurt for Vanessa Bryant and her girls even though I’ve never met them. I hurt for the families of the other people who lost their lives last Sunday on a helicopter in the fog. I’m sure you do, too.

But let’s not waste their pain and their loss by only rubber-necking their tragedy for a news cycle. Instead, let’s take the moment that we’ve been given – this eye-opening, heart-rending, eternity-realizing moment – and change the way we live for however much longer we live.

[Tweet “Death can help us change the way we live for however long we live.”]

If we do that – if we live lives to our fullest potential and for God’s greatest glory – then maybe Kobe’s death will actually become his greatest assist.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’m a product of the 80s – it’s when I graduated from high school, then college; it’s when I met and fell in love with Jesus, and when I met and fell in love with a beautiful follower of Jesus. Her name is Wendy, and we married shortly into the 90s.

The 80s are also when I watched televangelists at the height of their influence and at the depth of their moral failures. For a time, it seemed as if there would be a newly fallen preacher just as the collective church would catch her breath from the last fallen preacher. There was a lot of talk about Jesus returning because surely the end had to be near. This had to be the great falling away that the Bible spoke of.

But here we are, 30+ years later, and not much has changed. The difference is that now it isn’t televangelists failing in the faith, but high profile leaders falling away from the faith. Not long ago, Joshua Harris apparently kissed his faith goodbye, and even more recently, Marty Sampson, of Hillsong Worship fame, went public with the end of his faith and then public again with a clarification that, while his faith isn’t totally gone, it’s on shaky ground.

Shaky ground?

How can faith placed in an unshakeable God be shaky?

Granted, I can feel shaken when things around me (or, in me) get shaken, but if I’m in the firm grasp of an unshakeable God, what’s the expected outcome? Security in Him even when things in me feel insecure.

Which brings me to a crazy thought, one that I’m almost hesitant to put in print (although the small number of readers on this blog probably limits the pushback). At any rate, here goes:

Is it possible that our “everyone gets a trophy” culture has done more damage to believers than “cool” church has?

Granted, we need more sustenance in our faith than a 100% cool church may give, but even in a church that seeks to be all things to all people, all people are eventually going to realize that a mission like that is unrealistic. Nobody can ensure that everybody is getting what they want all the time, so even in the most seeker-sensitive church imaginable, people are forced to deal with the disappointment of unrealized expectations.

But long before they grew old enough to consider whether or not God could or would meet all of their needs, wants, and desires, the expectation that He should do that was created by a culture that did everything possible to ensure we would never be disappointed.

You didn’t win the race? Well, that just means you were the fastest second place runner!

Your team never won a single game? That’s okay. We’ve got a trophy for you just because you tried!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for building people up and encouraging healthy self-esteem. But I’m also for equipping people to handle reality, and the reality is that we will all face disappointment in life. Sometimes, the answer is simply no, and that doesn’t change just because we follow Jesus.

So when the “everybody gets a trophy” crowd that has been sheltered in bubble wrap steps into a relationship with a God who – to paraphrase the words of C. S. Lewis about Aslan – isn’t safe, but is good, what would we expect to happen the first time that God says no because there’s a greater yes He doesn’t want us to miss?

A crisis of faith that they may not be prepared to navigate.

A wise man once said that the 2 things every child needed to know were how to deal with disappointment and how to handle hearing no. Could I take that one step farther and say that those are the two things that every child of God must know, as well.

In fact, weathering the disappointment of a Fatherly “no” is often the doorway that leads us to the Father’s “yes.” When we understand that, we’ll stop saying no to our faith because the Father said no to us, and we’ll finally be free to push past the no in order to find the best yes.