Into this Crisis

In my opinion, the word “crisis” is one of the most overused words in our society.  One doesn’t have to look far to hear about the economic crisis, immigration crisis, Russian cyber hacking crisis, Healthcare crisis, fake news crisis, employment crisis, and even weather crisis. I am not trying to make light of serious issues that need to be addressed, only that every situation is not at crisis level. We have overused the word publicly so frequently it has lost it power.  Crisis literally means a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger, a time when a difficult or important decision must be made, or the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death. When we look closely at the definition, we have all faced a point of crises in our life.  We have all lived through a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger. We all have felt scared, uncertain, and fearful about something that was going on in our life. We all faced a time when a difficult or important decision had to be made.  Even some of us have faced that critical point in a disease when the illness went one of two ways.  Regardless of a definition, crises are personal, intimate, and downright petrifying when we are in the middle of our own crisis. So in times of crises, many of us naturally, honestly and humbling turn to God.  We seek God’s word and God’s people for words of hope, reassurance, and confidence that things will be better.  And if God shows up in a huge way, we are grateful, humbled, and renewed. God doesn’t get stuck in the tidy resolutions to our crises that we think end the story. We often believe that if things turn out okay, the story or crisis is over. If we have a few cents in our account at the end of the month, we tend to say, “Whew, that you Jesus that was close!” If we get through a health scare, we are tremendously humbled and grateful.  Yet God is not done. These so called endings are really beginnings, each with a new horizon of possibility. Not for us alone, but for the world God loves as well. Restoration of individuals, faith communities, or even entire families, is never only about that. God’s healing work moves outward, always expanding towards eschatological fulfillment.  Eschatological fulfillment in its simplest form means, that my salvation from my crisis may reach the end of the earth as it is now intertwined in God’s story. God’s story’s is always bigger than ours, holding our stories within God’s life and weaving them into a wide open future. So what does this all mean? Maybe it means when the next crisis hits us, we invite, ask and offer God our crisis. We understand that not only is it about us but also about God’s story to the world. God’s restoration, God’s healing and God’s sovereignty during our crisis is a vital part of God’s presence in our world. Because it’s it true that in our most critical defining moments in our life, God was there working all for good. Even in times we were too sacred to notice.

Peace, Love and Happiness:

Tommy