Daktari has a saying he likes to give his internal medicine
residents. “Ordering a test is
like picking your nose. You gotta
know what you’re gonna do with the results.”
Recently there has been such a stillness and loss of
traction for the world that geologists say the earth’s crust is literally more
still during the pandemic. They say it’s like a stillness they’d measure on
Christmas day. Could it be a
geological Sabbath? Psalm 46 says
“Be still AND know that I am God”. We are now 5 weeks into being still(er) and might
have started knowing that God is still God (or at least detecting that we
are not actually God- nor is the CDC, the WHO, the scientists, or even- gasp-the economy).
Here in America, most people do well in the shallows of
busy, busy, busy living but not really Life. Back in our Kenya life we learned that the Swahili word for
foreigner is “Mzungu”, meaning “one who moves around a lot”. Our time in Kenya really was preparing
us in so many ways. Now we are all brought to a standstill- a bizarre world-wide
standstill! And we can pause to
listen. What is God saying to us in his word? Can you stop and listen? Are we still so busy even home-bound
and sitting around, paying homage to glowing rectangle gods? Or might we
actually kneel in awestruck wonder before the One True God and plead for his
deliverance from this dread disease, his direction out of chaos into a place of
peace? Are we too busy to pray
even when the things of earth are growing strangely dim? This is busybody-testing time. What will your test results show?
Frank Laubach, in the precarious post WWII era of 1946, wrote a tiny book called "Prayer: The Mightiest Force in the World". In it he says on p.17 "So this is not a time for confidence, not is it a time for despair; it is the time to turn to God. It is the time for humility, penitence, desperate resolve, rectitude, obedience to the will of God, all-out sincerity!" That is where I got inspiration in the middle of March when I realized this could possibly be the fight of our lifetime for our family.
I am the wife of an infectious disease physician. He is certainly a health care worker
for whom many prayers have been prayed.
We had a neighbor who had a dream of praying over Michael as the Lord
was anointing him! We are so
thankful for the force field of prayer and protection of the Lord over this
city during the pandemic. We can
almost see the Mighty Fortress holding back a tsunami of Covid-19. Prayer is a powerful weapon against
darkness! We are not testing God. We are trusting.
The daktari is a man of few words. He has no good words for Covid-19 antibody testing. While it seems to be the next craze for
a world gone mad, it is a test that produces no good results. Nobody really
understands it yet. It is possible
that in the future studies will tell us if positive people are still positive
and if they have had re-infections or not. But nobody knows if it means they
will stay healthy and for how long or if they are dread virus shedders and for
how long. It seems to be a lateral
motion test for the sake of motion and for our busybodies to chase after. Beware. The results are a bit of a
booger.
If you want to rush out and stockpile on some supplies this
Covid -April 19, try looking for faith.
Run to God, run to the Word of God, run to prayer. Run to your reservoir of faith and see
if there’s anything left, even a tiny seed. Dive into your emergency savings tank of faith. When scarcity abounds, faith can even be borrowed from others to
kickstart something for your own. Get
out of the shallows, dig down deep and find faith that actually multiplies when the
global supply chain starts using it. These test results can clearly produce seeds of faith for
another generation, or not.
