How do you keep your head when everybody else is losing theirs? Excellent question. Sooner or later, life presents a crisis bigger than you, and me. Then what? How do you cope?
Said scenario is being played out before our very eyes, as I compose this article. Our world is on full-alert, and some in full panic, over the spread of Coronavirus. —Been to Costco lately?
This is not the first crisis in history: it won’t be the last. (Spoiler alert: Christians already know how the world ends.)
When, not if, you face a genuine emergency, calamity, or plain old bully, you have three options.
- Defiance: best captured from the contemporary novel, Circus of the Damned, by Laurell Hamilton, “I don’t have a master. I’m not sure I have an equal.” It begs the question: Self-assurance grounded in what exactly?…
- Dalliance: whistling past the graveyard. Summed in the popular philosophy, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Granted, said phrase is found in the Bible, but hardly as an endorsement for a guiding rule of life. In fact, quite the opposite.
- Deference: Trust in a source other than yourself. Such may be…
- Government: Let’s hope they know what they’re doing. Can't balance a budget. Medicare is a mess. Honolulu rail boondoggle.
- Society: Just go with popular opinion. I’m not so sure I want to surrender my survival to the herd instinct.
- God: “I distinguish the end from the beginning” (Is 46:10). “The mountains may be removed, and the hills quake: I will not remove my devotion from you” (Is 54:10). “We have this hope as an anchor of the soul” (He 6:19).
I must be honest: said hope requires faith. Faith in One bigger, better, and beyond me. I will testify: it works for me! …You got a better alternative?
(Look closely at photo)