I’m not handling virtual church well.
Two weeks ago, when the orders here in Virginia said no gatherings of a hundred or more people, my teammates and I served in the parking lot to turn cars away. Turns out, we didn’t have to be there. Only two cars showed. So, while the rest of our megachurch watched online, we sneaked into the auditorium to experience the service in person.
Last Sunday, my wife, our teenager, and I watched the livestream on our living room TV. I didn’t check my phone the entire time, but it killed me. I had to make kitchen runs to get through it. It didn’t feel like church.
This morning, Tibbs texted our group that he was going to watch the service in his vest and parking team hat. I smiled. I walked into my bedroom to kiss my wife goodbye. She asked why I was wearing my neon gear. “I’m going to watch the livestream in the Blue Ridge parking lot,” I answered.
When I got to the parking lot, even that wasn’t church enough. I counted the cars in the parking lot. Each belonged to a different member of the barebones broadcasting team inside. I’d have been the eleventh person in the building—one too many. So, I walked over to one of the traffic circles in our lot. For more than 200 years, a massive oak tree had covered that spot. When it came down after a lightning storm, the guy who built my house terraformed the island into a hill with boulders and trees, gravel paths and beautiful bushes. Every Sunday, that’s where my team prays together before we head out to our serving positions.
With nobody around and my good buddy, Nate, on my phone screen, I sang along with the kind of lyrics that can’t cure Coronavirus but can abate some cabin fever. As my friend started his talk, I noticed a bunch of weeds in the gravel. Dave meandered through the Bible, connecting disparate passages to each other and then to the quarantine we’re all enduring. As he avoided clichés, I pulled weeds. As he poked at habits and assumptions, I scooped up dead conifer sprigs. As he closed the service, I looked at the uprooted intruders I had piled high on one of the boulders.
Then it hit me. This whole COVID-19 deal has been weeding stuff out of my life. I’ve not been grateful enough for conveniences, for friendships, for freedom. Some of those Sabbaths I’ve skipped are now getting piled in a row. This pandemic is going to wreck lives, even end lives. It’s going to break businesses and crumble egos. Some of our lives will never be the same. None of our stories will, either. So, I don’t want to make light of the suffering that devastates others in our current reality.
But my God is big enough to leverage this historic shutdown to do work in my soul and probably yours. He can bring purpose to this chaos, redemption to what we’re losing.
For me, it’s a been a hard factory reset of my firmware. It’s led to more time in nature, where I feel Jesus most and closest. It’s asked me how much of my identity is wrapped up in my commercial value and what those paychecks afford. It’s confronted my privilege, my arrogance, my condescension. It’s alerted me that I’m not as good of a friend as I had previously thought. It’s reminded me that I’m not in control.
I’m writing this all next to the Big Otter River. (For locals, my camp chair is next to the new Route 43 bridge.) The river didn’t pause for this pandemic. The cherry and dogwood blossoms didn’t wait for the governor’s permission to flower. The heron I just saw worried more about the rumble of my exhaust than about tomorrow. The red horse behind the split rail fence doesn’t appear to be calculating how long he can live off his savings.
This cultural moment will have no effect on them. Nature will live on unphased and unchanged. Hopefully, I will not. And my prayer for all of us is that neither will anyone else.
