Have you ever tried to slide your way down a steep grassy hill in sneakers? Front leg in front. Slipping … inching your way down? Losing your grip. Falling even? I have. And this morning? That’s how this all feels. Like a never ending slippery traverse down a seemingly endless, steep grassy hill.

My thoughts this morning feel compressed. Maybe because life has tightened so! Quarantines … self distancing … lock downs. Why wouldn’t compression show up? Sure a crisis pulls us all closer together. “We’re neither Republicans or Democrats … we’re only Americans.” Ok I get it. But remember. The longest playing radio station in America is WIIFM … “what’s in it for me.”

Let’s be honest. As altruistic as we might be at times like this, self preservation creeps if not floods in. We love our fellow man. But when chaos arrives? It’s all about you! Can’t help but be the case. Consider the fact that gun stores across the country are sold out. And what about the frenzy at our food stores. I kinda rest my case.

Cormac McCarthy wrote a book in 2006 titled The Road. Won a Pulitzer Prize. The book details the journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth.

Not to be an alarmist … but go pick it up. If your stomach can tolerate it. Helped me bracket the extremes we’re facing now. No fear or even expectation this will evolve in a “Road” like experience. But sometimes defining a future, however irrelevant … helps. Ok. Bizarre! But honesty on my part. Now I am not so possessed by our current “invisible enemy … COVID

Not that I become a fatalist. But indeed regardless of whether the current threat lasts three weeks or a year, there is one silver lining? The tectonic plates of life will have shifted. In my mind? Maybe in some subtle ways for the better. Our lives will indeed have been a revision of what we’ve lived for decades. I often think. What’s God see?

Where is He in all this? Let me share my self talk here. What I say as I talk to myself. When I think about my Lord. God says, “How could my children fall so far? Ignore my Son’s teachings? Live in such sin? They have drifted too far. My judgement, my promised response has always been declared. Change is needed. Behaviors like these will incur my wrath. This has always been my Word.

“I believe the Lord is all pervasive … in everything. He may at times be harsh. But He’s never wrong. I’m not implying any of our struggle here is easy or not gripping. But I do see a larger purpose. At least this is where my thoughts take me. Helps soften my anxiety. But like all leaders. As the leader of my family, I have to land somewhere between apathy (feeling nothing) and panic.

Where? With concern… seriousness. Clear eyes. My loved ones will check my eyeballs for their cue as to how they should absorb a confusing new reality.

So we move on. Hopefully forward despite the setbacks. I always try to tell myself. “Don’t get too far over your skis!” Mental “illusions,” fears aren’t helpful. You only have NOW and NEXT. NOW and NEXT. Like inching down that grassy hill. Patience, confidence that all will be. It will be what it will be. My bet? God is in this. It will all be fine.