Today I am taking in the blessing of sunshine on a cold midwinter’s day and savoring the hint of spring such a day brings. I do that even though crocuses are still deep underground and no hint of green shows on the branches of our forsythia bush.

My hope is not in what I see, but faith in the memory of other springs as well as Who created them. Today they have adjusted my thoughts caught up in the discouraging news that pummels me from every corner of the world.

It seems that nearly everyone I speak with speaks with concern about what is happening in so many places in the world. It doesn’t take long in such conversations to start to feel agitated or even fearful. It is a temptation to see no light in the darkness growing larger on the horizon.

If no light is seen, perhaps it is because we are not looking for light in the right places.

I am currently reading in the book of Isaiah as a result of a sermon series on this Old Testament book. I am struck by the reality of how dark the world was that Isaiah was living in. Yes, darkness was there in abundance, but Isaiah also pointed to the future coming of the Messiah even though he was writing between 750-700 BC.

I cannot help, but read the prophet’s words and not think of the world as it is in 2021 and see the possibility of a corollary.

What were the problems the people of God were facing back then? Rather than get caught up in the specifics of the kings (good and not good) and their friends and/or enemies, I want to look at the truth of the problems behind the problems. What were the people looking toward that deepened their darkness?

God’s people were trusting in the wrong things.

They were trusting in other kings. They had turned their back on God and determined to trust instead in the chariots and horsemen of Egypt. Later they entered into alliances with Assyria and then Babylon to help them despite how ungodly and misaligned they were from these godless nations.

They had also begun trusting in other gods, things produced by their own hands. Idolatry was rampant. It was easier to trust in what they could buy or make than to trust in the Lord.

To these they added trust in themselves. In short, they had become self-reliant. Perhaps it was their pride in their own wealth or skills, their reputation or past success that built up this over estimation of what they alone could do or accomplish.

The people of God had also chosen to seek the voice of their leaders before seeking the voice of the Lord. Their trust was in the kings and leaders they had asked God for so long before, rather than in the Lord.

On top of all this, they had not humbled themselves nor repented of their faithlessness.

Yet God loved them so much, He chose to allow everything to be shaken they had trusted in so they could come face-to-face with the unshakeable.

I wonder if that is not true of us today.

Could it be that we have trusted more in governments and leaders of all types and persuasions, programs and treaties from one end of the earth to another, drones and technical equipment beyond our imagination, words of men more than words from God?

What I see ever more clearly is that darkness has been a reality for many years and many eras, to think or believe otherwise is to operate in denial. Before you reject that idea, consider the sense of darkness that pervaded the entire world through two deadly world wars. We can glance over our shoulder and see clearly that example.

For us, even as in Isaiah’s lifetime, there was light ahead that could be seen for those who looked and trusted in God more than in any of the things they had begun to trust.

The shaking seasons of our lives have often ultimately gifted us with the surest sense of the Lord’s goodness and trustworthiness.

Major Daniel Webster Whittle served during the bloody American Civil War, a time of great darkness in the United States. But years later, the light of the gospel and the influence of Dwight L. Moody resulted in the lyrics of 200 hymns flowing from his life. One of his refrain’s many of us still knows was written in 1883:

But “I know Whom I have believed,

And am persuaded that He is able

To keep that which I’ve committed

Unto Him against that day.”

When I look for light in the midst of darkness when everything is being shaken, I am reminded He is allowing it to reveal to me what is unshakeable.

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright.”

Ps. 20:7-8 (ESV)

It’s been nearly a year now since we have all to varying degrees been dealing with life in the midst of a pandemic. We have heard (and still hear) the staggering numbers of those contracting the disease, those who do not recover, and on and on it goes. Then we hear reports about treatments and new vaccines with conflicting information from sources that can be easy to question. We all get that now, but there is another area that is just starting to be recognized by some in the medical field about the great cost of this pandemic beyond those numbers we hear on our nightly newscasts. We are beginning to hear what the prevention model we have used is costing in so many ways.

Never before in recent history have so many learned what losing a sense of community with one another means. Few considered the cost on the lives of those whose lives they have tried to save through restrictions causing isolation. But a recent newscast featuring an interview with three heads of medical facilities in a major city are pointing to that very thing and the long-term impact of isolation on all of us whether we immediately recognize it or not.

No matter what age or personality type we may be, we were made for relationship and community. Yes, relationships and community are messy, but the absence of it has negative consequences in our lives as well that affect us physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

Whatever our faith background we have missed the freedom of participating in it to varying degrees over the past year. Every other crisis that has occurred and impacted a large part of the population has meant those places where we practice our faith is where we have all flocked for courage, support, hope, prayer, and a sense of not facing those things alone.

If the weather was good some could gather outdoors, but in many places that was not possible due to weather or wasn’t permitted for various reasons. That meant we started trying to adapt to virtual times for our faith expression and what did we discover?

Most of us discovered that virtual technology was better than nothing, but never the same as joining together in person.

As some of us are not able to return to physical places of expression of our faith, have we learned to appreciate what was so easy to critique before all this?

We tend to idealize our places of faith and have high expectations of what it will be like there. In doing so we can forget some key things and perhaps now we can grow from learning them when and as we are able to return.

“Much anger towards the church and most disappointments in the church are because of failed expectations. We expect a disciplined army of committed men and women who courageously lay siege to the worldly powers; instead we find some people who are more concerned with getting rid of crabgrass in their lawns. We expect a community where saints who are mature in the virtues of love and mercy, and find ourselves working on a church supper where there is more gossip than there are casseroles. We expect to meet minds that are informed and shaped by the great truths and rhythms of scripture, and find persons whose intellectual energy is barely sufficient to get them to the comics or sports page. At such times it is more important to examine and change our expectations than to change the church, for the church is not what we organize but what God gives, not the people we want to be with but the people God gives us to be with – a community created by the descent of the Holy Spirit in which we submit ourselves to the Spirit’s affirmation, reformation, and motivation. There must be no idealization of the church. And lamentation ought to be restrained. Eulogy and anguish are alike misplaced. Churches are not little Jerusalems, either old or new.”

Eugene Peterson in Reversed Thunder

Peterson’s words from his powerful book on The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination is challenging like all of Peterson’s books, but challenge is often what we most need to grow and see things from a more complete lens.

Peterson reminds the reader that those churches John was pastoring that appear in the early chapters of Revelation were groups that met at specific places in various societies, but the admonitions to them and the failings noted can be applied to churches today as instructive because the very challenges of being in community with imperfect people and pastors is still true today. He gives us a startling reminder in the quote that follows:

“The churches of the Revelation show us that churches are not Victorian parlors where everything is always picked up and ready for guests. They are messy family rooms. Entering a person’s house unexpectedly, we are sometimes met with a barrage of apologies. St. John does not apologize. Things are out of order, to be sure, but that is what happens to churches that are lived in. They are not show rooms. They are living rooms, and if the persons living in there are sinners, there are going to be clothes scattered about, handprints on the woodwork, and mud on the carpet.”

Eugene Peterson in Reversed Thunder

We want to feel affirmed in our places of faith and that is one of the things they are to provide for us, but they are also to be places of correction so we can see the areas that cause us to stumble and grow and mature. Through that both/and we can embrace the hope of the message of scripture despite being in a messy living room we call church.

We forget ourselves and our own condition when we expect our churches to be more like museums than living rooms.

In this time of missing community, being together in these messy living rooms, let us not forget that the life of faith is not a sprint and all of us has a need for growth that includes both affirmation and correction. Only when both are present balancing grace and mercy with truth and holiness, will we be sustained now and in the future