isolation – Gospel Minutes for Everyday Missionaries

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One of the favorite parts of my week is sitting in the hot tub each Sunday night with Jason Comerford. Sometimes we watch wild animals come out of the quiet forest. This week we listened as a nearby fir tree made an enormous “crack” and plunged to the ground with a thunderous crash. In the midst of relative isolation, we enjoy hot water and good fellowship, we pray for each other and our church, and we ask God lots of questions.

And the question that has been most frequently on our minds and hearts in recent months is this: Where is God working in the midst of all this pain and chaos? What is He doing?

I read a blog this week by a pastor and writer I enjoy named John Myer. He asked that exact same question. And he used a set of Where’s Waldo? drawings to provide a possible answer.

First, here’s a Where’s Waldo? drawing from 2019:

How long did you have to look before you found Waldo? I confess I STILL haven’t. (I blame bad eyesight, LOL!)

And now here’s the 2020 social distancing edition:

(Image credit: Times Free Press)

THAT was a lot easier, wasn’t it?

What’s the difference between the two drawings? Obviously the 2019 edition had a lot of noise: visual distractions, lots going on, lots of people. (We might now look back with a sigh—THOSE were the days!)

But in the 2020 edition, those distractions have been mostly removed. We enter a meadow near a forest in a state of solitude. Waldo is much more obvious once the distractions are gone, once the decks are cleared.

Myers made this very uncomfortable observation:

From the spiritual standpoint, God has cleared the decks. There’s very little church stuff left to camouflage Him. The only things left are you, the Bible, and those Christians you meet with. Gone are the pageants, the events, the programs, and every possible fig leaf. (Bareknuckle Bible)

The “fig leaf” part really got to me. Darlene and I had a fig tree once. Fig leaves are scratchy, itchy, awkward, and very uncomfortable. They are of course what Adam and Eve applied as they sought (unsuccessfully) to hide their sin and shame from the God with Whom they had previously fellowshipped in the Garden. (In His mercy and grace, God of course gave them much more comfortable coverings, made of leather—costly as they were in terms of some poor, innocent animal’s blood.)

God calls us to the exact opposite of this scenario: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.“ Jeremiah 29:13

In the Garden, after Adam and Eve sinned, they stopped seeking and started hiding. God in His grace and mercy sought them out instead. And He has done this with each and every one of us. “God demonstrates His own love toward us in this While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God’s seeking was done on the cross. Christ’s blood became the covering for our sin and shame.

Now that we are forgiven, now that we have no more need of fig leaves, God desires us to seek Him. And He PROMISES us that if we do so with all our heart, we will find Him!

What has this got to do with COVID-19 and social isolation, the risk of possibly debilitating or mortal illness, loss of employment or retirement funds, the departure of many of our sports and entertainment choices, and the sudden evaporation of most if not all our previous trappings of doing church?

You may already see that the answer to this question lies in the two contrasting Where’s Waldo? drawings above. Peel away the distractions, remove the fig leaves, and God is far more easily found.

But, have we been looking? Or do we instead seek to embrace new fig leaves—to create new distractions with which to repopulate the Waldo drawing that is our world?

Are we complaining about our new normal and asking God to restore our previous comforts? Or are we seeking Him with all our hearts TODAY? Now is the time when, perhaps, He will be most easily found. If we would only seek.

Jeremiah challenges me, time and again, when my fig leaves are removed and I feel uncomfortably exposed, to claim God’s promise: “You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.”

Will you join me in this, as my brother or sister in Christ?

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By Larry Short

I was struck today by Pastor Steve’s thought-provoking Oasis: Elim at Home message about isolation and Noah’s Ark. You may already know that I’m a huge fan of the Noah’s ark story (Genesis 6-8). My entire office at home is decorated with Noah’s ark artwork. When I was in my 20s, I wrote a novel about the situation in Noah’s day. I’ve always found thinking about this biblical-historical account extremely fascinating. And despite the critics of the story, I have no doubt it’s literally true—because Jesus Himself said so.

In fact, I was super excited a few years back when Russell Crowe (an actor I respect) starred in a new movie called Noah. Darlene and I found the nicest theater we could watch it in and rushed to see one of the first showings.

And we were bitterly disappointed. To the point of anger, even. How could anyone possibly mess up such a beautiful, compelling story so badly?

Anyway, I won’t give my critical review here. Suffice it to say, if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t bother.

But with all my thinking over the years about Noah and his story, I had never really thought about what it must have felt like to actually BE the last family on earth—isolated with a menagerie in a huge barge, being tossed about on the waves in a world gone mad.

Steve asked some perceptive questions that got me going:

What was the downside of being on the ark?

Well, at first you think of all the obvious things. The smell must have been special. No power, no running water, no real sanitation—and I doubt you’d want to build a fire on a big wooden boat made of pitch, so how would you cook? Meals must have been rather dull.

But beyond that, there are the incalculables more difficult to imagine. How would you actually feel knowing that you were the last family on earth? How would you feel knowing that everyone else you had ever met and cared for was now dead? Talk about a feeling of isolation!

And how would you think about the future? Would you wonder, as the days dragged on, if you might have to live out the rest of your life on that big, stinky boat? How they must have longed for dry land.

What do you think Noah and his family were missing?

I am a person who loves to spend time in the mountains. Normally April would be the start of my morel mushroom-hunting season, and my son Nathan and I would head out to the Eastern Cascades, probably meeting my sister Kay and her husband Tom there, to launch out into our state’s beautiful forests in search of our elusive prey. But now, all the national forestlands, national and state parks, and camping facilities have been closed. I can still walk through the little wooded areas near my home, such as the Tacoma Watershed, which is nice, but it’s not the same. I’m itching to get back out into the mountains and hunt some mushrooms again!

And I also feel guilty when I feel this way, because I know it’s far worse for many others, such as for our friends Larry and Marilyn Nelson, who are confined in their small apartment in a retirement home, and for those who have been exposed to the virus and live in fear or who are sick and are not yet sure why. I am thankful every day not to be in that boat.

But I wonder how Noah’s sons and daughters-in-law felt when they looked out over the rail onto that endless, churning sea. Would a day ever come when things would be different? When the hope they had for a new and better world would become a reality?

Finally, what were the advantages of being isolated on the ark?

I think the biggest and most obvious advantage was that they were alive! In His mercy, God spared them from His incredible judgment against a rebellious world.

And this knowledge would have given rise to an incredible sense of hope. God had a plan. He intended to restart civilization. They would see it through. They had a second chance!

In many ways, I feel the same way about the current crisis. Yes, we are at home, isolated. But we are alive! God in His grace and mercy has spared us from this plague. And, while a resurgence is always possible and we must be diligent to guard against it, Washington State Department of Health data shows that infections and deaths in our state are on a downslope. Things will get better! God has a plan. There is hope.

Hope is incredibly important to the human condition. Many people misunderstand the word hope because it has been diluted by our culture’s current abuse of the term. But really, in my view, it is more akin to the term vision.

And the Bible says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18 KJV).

I think the same thing is true of hope. It is a gift from God to renew us (Isaiah 40:31) and keep us focused on His plan (Jeremiah 29:11). It’s hope that arises because He has saved us and has called us to love Him and live committed to His purposes (Romans 8:28)—hope that we are on a journey, and at the end of that journey will be a new and better world!

There are many good things about our current isolation: It is keeping us safe. It gives us time to think, time to get our priorities straight, time to readjust our focus. And it brings to us hope for a coming day when we will see the goodness of our beautiful Savior in the land of the living (Psalm 27:13)!

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Tag: isolation

“Every Possible Fig Leaf” Removed

The Last Family on Earth