The sneaky tricky thing about silence is that it can be either deafening or calming. Because when you come face-to-social-distancing-face with a global pandemic and your life feels like it’s in total limbo (that infuriating combination of stagnation and free fall), you also come face to face with what you put your trust in. And how much (or how not very much) that trust is actually worth. When there’s no more sports and no more movies and no more clubs and no more getting-together and more and more literal distance and isolation, there is a choice of how to look at it.
The most obvious (and, if I’m honest, attractive) option is to take this as a deliciously golden opportunity to despair; to despair loudly, and often. But it’s also an invitation to be still. Not in the stagnating sort of way, but in a way that grounds me. Grounds me in Christ. It’s the active stillness of spiritually wrestling with what it really means to trust in Jesus, to worship in the midst of chaos, to be calm in the midst of the storm.
On the one hand, I’m forced to confront how woeful I am at most of that, as well as my many limitations - for instance, the limit of my control over my day-to-day life. On the other hand, I get Jesus. Right now, life has removed a lot of the louder distractions that I often allow to drown out God’s voice. It’s been a long year already. And we don’t actually know how much longer this pandemic is going to last, or how bad things are actually going to get. But I know that God is good. And faithful. And near. Times like this, what else can we do but throw our arms around Him and hold on for dear life?