Signs of Spring (and Hope)

Spring has arrived and my weeds are coming back strong. Mrs. G is once again hunting field mice. Taking out the trash I may have seen the first mosquito of the year. God in his wisdom has given the gift of survival to the common, the ordinary, and yes, the annoying. This gives me hope as I often qualify for all three of those attributes.

In spite of our best attempts to destroy ourselves at times, I believe God has also given the gift of survival to humanity. This does not mean our journey will always be pleasant or easy. Viewed objectively we are a silly species. I can find no scripture that speaks to God’s sense of humor, but the evidence leads me to believe he must have a great sense of humor to put up with our arrogance, self-importance, and hubris. This may be sacrilegious but I have this picture of God sitting back with a big bowl of popcorn, laughing, as he scrolls through our Facebook posts.

The news today is filled with nothing but articles about the Coronavirus or Covid-19, often accompanied by this phrase or something similar, “We are in uncharted territory.” … Newsflash! … Every day of our life is uncharted territory. Humanities’ very existence is uncharted territory.

I’ve thought about my mom and dad a lot this past week. They were married during the great depression (the real one) and went through the turmoils of World War II. I’ve wondered how they would have responded to our current crisis. They were part of the “The Greatest Generation,” an attribute not to be taken lightly.

I know the first thing they would tell me would be to quote the scripture that defined their lives, “… seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” If I heard that scripture from Matthew 6:33, once growing up, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Putting God first was the North Star of their lives. It was a fixed destination that stayed constant as the world around them changed.

They would have told me about their life as newlyweds in 1933. They lived with my dad’s parents in a four-room house in Sherman, Texas. They had chickens and a garden and were thankful for their “riches.” My dad scraped floors before electric sanders were invented for 10 cents a day, and was thankful.

At the onset of World War II, my mother assumed that her husband would serve in the military and in a romantic notion became a volunteer nurse’s aide, thinking that if something happened to him, perhaps she would be able to care for him. My dad failed his physical and managed grocery stores during the war while my mother rolled bandages and gave sponge baths to wounded soldiers, not exactly what she expected.

Unknown to them at the time, on the other side of the world was a horror of unprecedented proportions … the Holocaust!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “What seems to us more important, more painful, and more unendurable is really not what is more important, more painful and more unendurable, but merely that which is closer to home. Everything distant which for all its moans and muffled cries, its ruined lives and millions of victims, that does not threaten to come rolling up to our threshold today, we consider endurable and of tolerable dimensions.”

What will roll up to our threshold with this crisis?

At it’s worst it will mean the death of a loved one and all the pain that accompanies that. At the least, it will mean a shortage of toilet paper and a lot of bitching and moaning. Yes, we are all in uncharted territory, but the constant is that we are God’s children, His love is unconditional … and spring is coming.