For five months, the passage at the top of these letters has been about how “by waiting and calm [we] shall be saved,” and that was appropriate for the time. We needed to know that the Lord was going to get us through this era-defining challenge and that we simply needed to rely on him with patience and trust. Today, however, I have decided that it is time to start printing a new passage, and I chose the one I preached on two weeks ago.
Yes, the global pandemic continues, and yes, we need to keep doing our part through masking up, social distancing, and limiting the number of people we are in close contact with; but even while we remain diligent in these practices, I think it is also time for us to begin to think outward once again. We understand the pandemic better than before, we know what we have to do to keep it under control, and things have “settled” as much as they are going to until a vaccine is developed. Now that we recognize what our reality is going to look like for the next few months, we once again have the freedom to think beyond ourselves.
Christianity, after all, is unique in its declaration, not that God is loving, but that God is love. Our entire religion is built, following the example of Jesus, on sacrificing ourselves for others, meaning that our faith becomes sick and atrophied when we spend too much time thinking about ourselves.
This world is a deserted place. The crowd is hungry. But rather than send them away, the Lord calls us to give them some food ourselves. Whatever we bring to Jesus, he will multiple and give back to us, so that we might distribute it for the salvation of the world.
Fr. Moore 