As I write, the coronavirus is rampaging across the world and it seems like society is shutting down. For itinerant Christian workers like me this means that in the last fortnight just about everything in our diaries has been cancelled. Our friends who lead churches are all frantically busy figuring out new ways to pastor their flocks, but those of us with travelling ministries all of a sudden find ourselves looking at many weeks in which we no longer have anything structured to do or to prepare for. As one friend said to me a couple of days ago “a few weeks back I had 6 international trips planned and as much work in my diary as I can handle and I was completely satisfied and fulfilled. Now it has all gone, unexpectedly, in the space of a few short days.”
This week has been disorienting. I had set aside time to prepare addresses for multiple conferences that are no longer going ahead. It is not as if immediately shifting to other kinds of work is something that can be done without thought. Added to which my wife is a key worker teacher of vulnerable children who is trying to figure out what the next weeks will look like in her school and we have a primary school aged son who is now going to need parental care. Even when I decide how to use my new-found time profitably, the situation is so fluid there are no guarantees that my plans will work anyway. Like no other week I can remember, God has used this week to teach me that I can neither rely on my plans nor get my sense of identity and achievement (let alone security) from my Christian ministry activity.
Elijah’s first appearance in 1 Kings 17 is astonishing: “As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.” This is immediately followed not by some amazing revival tour of the Northern Kingdom, returning people to God. But, instead, God directing him into a completely isolated period of three years, first in the Kerith Ravine and then in Zaraphath, the land of death. I think the reason is that, however much he has already learned to stand before God, trusting him alone and leaning into his provision only for his security, he is going to need to have learned it even more acutely for what lies ahead. It is training in trusting. I guess it was both frustrating and anxious, especially when God made the brook dry up.
The lesson for workers like me is that Elijah’s enforced stopping was not spiritually pointless. It was the time for him to learn to stand before God. It will help our spirits greatly to consider our blank diaries with the same lens. This is not useless, wasted space. This is space most of all to pray and cry out to God. To bury ourselves in his word. (When do I normally have the space to luxuriate for an hour a day in Genesis? What a blessing!). Maybe to fast. It may be space in which to bless our neighbours and care for the vulnerable. It might provide time to assist those frantic church leaders. Or perhaps to read, write, produce resources, ring people with a word of encouragement, or wade through all the ministry admin backlog that most of us ignore most of the time. The fact that we aren’t going to be doing the fruitful things we thought we were going to be doing doesn’t mean this will be a fruitless period. Just that God is giving us opportunities to be differently fruitful.
Most of all, my hope for myself is that this time deepens my prayer life and dependence on God. That I treat it like (unexpected, enforced) sabbath. He has not ceased to be the ever-faithful, totally-in-control God. And if coronavirus completely reconfigures my entire life and ministry hereafter I need to accept that as a gift from his good hand. Which means leaning in and trusting him and not my various activities which can vanish like a morning mist.
Finally, how good to remember that the Bible insists we take nothing for granted and hold lightly and provisionally to all our plans aware that God may disrupt us at no notice and entirely at his pleasure:
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”
James 4:13-15