In December of 2019, I saw a video discussing some unknown virus in China that had affected a few hundred people. It was so strange to think that all of that craziness was caused by a man eating a bat in a Chinese town about which I had never heard. Fast forward about a month, the first case appeared in Washington state. These things come and go all the time. Remember Ebola? What about Swine Flu? Then, cases continued to increase. I, like many Americans, thought that there was nothing to it at all. It would simply die off like so many ailments have over the years.
In March of 2020, my great-grandmother passed away and I traveled to Kentucky for her funeral. I also had plans to attend the SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament later that week with my father. One night, we were watching ESPN and we heard the news that the SEC tournament would be played without fans. In a matter of hours, all sports were gone. Rudy Gobert, a center for the Utah Jazz, touched every microphone in the room where he was being interviewed, then tested positive hours later. It did not stop at sports, every event was being cancelled or postponed left and right. While I was in Kentucky, the world as we knew it had changed.
Preachers all across the country (and probably all across the world) preached similar sermons about “A Disease Worse than Coronavirus.” It wasn’t long until congregations had made the decision not to meet at all due to the possibility of someone getting sick. Just think about that. If someone told you five years ago that congregations would stop meeting out of the possibility of getting sick, what would your reaction be?
We were flooded with images from China, predicted death tolls in the hundreds of millions, global panic. I was personally affected with COVID-19, as in January of 2021, I contracted the virus. Opinions and “takes” have raged on for over two years, and each person is convinced that he has the answer to the coronavirus.
Even worse than COVID-19, I am afraid that congregations of the Lord’s church faced a pandemic of their own. We learned where the values of some lie. What have I learned through two years of COVID-19?
Some Value Self Over Service
It is amazing how quickly self-preservation mode kicks in for some individuals. Remember the start of the pandemic? You could not find essentials on shelves. I was in a grocery store and a man had filled his cart with over one hundred cans of soup. It should be no surprise that the world chose selfishness. What about the church?
Surely, good church folks wouldn’t be selfish, right? In fact, quite the opposite happened. What happened to contribution? Taking a look at any church bulletin will show you that people have stopped giving as the Lord commanded (2 Cor. 9:6-7). What about food pantries? What about community outreach? How much has been done to help others in the past two years?
The events of the past years have revealed a problem that was lying under the surface for decades. We care more about self than we do about others. It did not take a global pandemic to make this shift.
