Today’s article may be a little chaotic. It’s about something not well-defined or understood, and its solution is unknown to me. This article will hopefully serve as a target; it’d be good to have lots of Christian minds brainstorming solutions to this issue.
Just about everyone’s had THE virus. I’ve had it once for sure, maybe twice. It don’t mess around. I started developing symptoms after recovery that, apparently, quite a few people have developed. It’s commonly called Long Covid or PASC. Symptoms include fatigue, cognitive difficulties, decreased mobility, respiratory and cardiological issues, pain, malaise, and many others (psu.edu). You probably either know someone dealing with this now, or are dealing with it yourself.
Research is not super easy to get ahold of, and what I could find was either low-quality or not peer reviewed. Its existence isn’t really contested, but little is known about its prevalence. Best I could find was that about 43% of those who recover will experience Long Covid. Many haven’t recovered after almost two years!
My concern with this is its potential effect on faith. Things like driving at night, interacting with lots of people, spending time together outside of worship, church events, service projects, teaching/preaching/song leading, evangelism, etc. are part of our Christian life. While some of these can be difficult on a good day, they’re now practically impossible (or significantly more difficult) for people with Long Covid.
The church has always had members with chronic, debilitating diseases. Normally, our shut-ins are a very small percentage of overall membership. With Long Covid often compared to the effects of chemotherapy, this number is likely to grow significantly. If roughly half of our recovered members end up with these long-term effects, how do we address this?
Since it affects both young adults and senior citizens, how do we navigate its impact? What can members who now have Long Covid do to stay active in their churches? While living with a chronic health condition is no cake walk, those of us who do are at least mentally equipped to accept it. Members who enjoyed good health before Long Covid are struggling to adapt to this change.
At some point in the near-ish future, I hope to write an article with potential solutions. It will be geared toward those who’re experiencing major health issues for the first time. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to do a lot of praying, planning, brainstorming, and creative problem solving. Nothing’s too big for God, and we’ll find a solution with his help.
By Janelle Pollard As a nurse, time management is very important. There are often more tasks to do than it seems I have time for. Generally, what I do in the first 2 hours determines how the next 10 will go. Some mornings, I get right to work, doing full assessments on my patients, filling […]
We’ve experienced some interesting things in the past few years, don’t you think? Some of it has been unpleasant, but I have seen so many good things come out of it. We’ve grown closer to our friends and family. In general, being kind to the strangers all around us! In times of struggle and disaster, helping the community in a very hands on way. Maybe we got caught up in some of the negativity in the beginning, but more and more I’m seeing positivity and the spread of it! At the start of a new year, I like to read over some of my favorite verses. These verses help me in a lot of different ways, and I’d like to share them with you.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Father who is full of mercy, the God…
There are several variations of a quote that goes something like, “People can inspire you or they can drain you…choose wisely.” Sage advice if it’s true that we become like the people we spend the most time with. We need to invest in relationships that will bring out the best in us, and be careful around those whose disagreeable traits could rub off on us.
Don’t you think it’s pretty easy to tell the difference? When I think of those who inspire me, I can rattle off several reasons why. The same goes for those who drain me (that sounds harsh, I know). Here’s how that looks to me:
Most of my life, I’ve heard that I should be memorizing Scripture. From Bible class teachers, parents, college professors, and more. Some Scriptures you hear and read so much, you don’t have to work to memorize it. You already know it. It’s already written on your heart. And if you’ve used the same Bible for years, you can probably even find exactly which verse you’re looking for not by the book name or chapter, but by the location on the page. There are many places in Scripture that we can find the author encouraging the reader to memorize Scripture. But why?
“Why is it so important to memorize Scripture if I have access to the Bible at all times?”
Well, there’s actually more than one answer to that question…
Because God said so. This is one of those answers we probably heard as children. And the…
We’ve all heard the phrase, “When it rains, it pours.” While there are rare occasions that we might get to focus on a single responsibility or situation, most of our time is spent juggling several simultaneously. When one challenge arises, we expect a few more to come knocking. While this can be overwhelming (a feeling Satan just loves for us to have), these are the times in our life when we find out what we’re really made of. When it seems hardest to make a godly decision, when it seems impossible to know the right answer, when you don’t WANT to do the right thing, when the rubber meets the road, your response reveals the contents of your heart. Over the past few weeks, I have seen fellow Christians, young children, and total strangers whose lives have been turned upside down by tragedy, uncertainty, and harm. In…
Many ethical lawyers provide valuable legal services to the public. However, “slip-and-fall” attorneys likewise exist to encourage you to sue any and everything. This latter type of legal practitioner typically advertises on television or buys up many billboards to boast about how much money they have earned for their clients. One such commercial for a particular “ambulance chaser” in Atlanta features an actress portraying a female accident victim claiming that the one responsible for her crash had come “out of nowhere.”
This statement is, of course, ridiculous. Unless this client lived in a fictional sci-fi world where physics allowed for the spontaneous generation of matter from nothing, it was more a matter of her senses “betraying” her. This truth sounds strange, but it is a matter of science. Our five senses intake 11 million bits of information per second but compress it to less than 50 bits. Amazingly, it only takes our brain a half-second to achieve this feat!1
Sometimes, when we focus on a task, like driving, we fall victim to what is called “inattentional blindness.” This phenomenon results from the energy required to compress the previously mentioned information.2 In the case of our accident victim, the other driver was most likely visible to her. Yes, that driver may have been driving recklessly. However, it was more likely that she became “blind” to that driver until it was too late for her to react. (Remember there is that half-second delay in receiving sensory information and the processing thereof.)
So, what is our devotional thought? It is not that the flesh fails us. We know that the physical body has limitations, such as inattentional blindness. Our study, instead, is about what we will term inattentional spiritual blindness. Like our accident victim, some claim that the universe we inhabit “came out of nowhere.” It boggles the mind that, though we’ve never witnessed something arise from nothing outside of science fiction, some maintain that an explosion of matter from nothing, billions of years ago, gave rise to you and me today.
Why is that? It is not a lack of information. David reminds us that the heavens proclaim God’s handiworks (Psalm 19.1-6). To this, Paul adds that God’s “invisible attributes” are “clearly seen” in creation (Romans 1.20). The inattentional spiritual blindness results from people focusing too much on the physical than the spiritual. As Paul continues in Romans 1, unbelievers exchange the truth for a lie to worship the creature rather than the Creator (1.25). Atop of the testimony of nature, though, we have the added testimony of God Himself in the book He inspired (cf. 2 Timothy 3.16). So, despite the atheists mocking demand for God to reveal Himself, He is standing beside the atheist in the blind spot of his own making.
Such people remaining disobedient to the Gospel will find themselves taken unaware by the Judgment of God. At that moment, their knees, and tongues, reluctant to do so in life, will be bowed by the presence of He Who would be their Savior, and they will confess His name (cf. Philippians 2.10). But, of course, the recognition comes too late to prevent the eternal destructive consequences.
I would encourage you to work on your attentiveness to your surroundings. More than preserving your physical life, it may likewise profit you spiritually. Blindness, whether caused by limitations of the flesh or choice, eventually proves detrimental.
The life of a true Christian is filled with change. We learn where we are weak, and try to be better. It’s kind of like a never ending home improvement project. There will always be areas of our spiritual walk with God that could be better. Because this is the case, many religious books, sermons and Gospel meetings are created around a theme that will help us to grow. In the Church there is a plethora of information to help us in our Christianity, but I want to focus on the basics and answer a vital question. What does it mean to be a Christian?
I want to answer this question with a passage in scripture that we may not immediately think of. We may think of 1 Timothy 1:5, or 2 Peter 1:5-7, which are great verses, but I’d like to suggest that Jesus in Luke 18:15-17 gives us the bottom line of Christianity.
It reads, “Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
Jesus teaches the importance of humility. You want to enter the Kingdom of God? Have an attitude of humility. He uses the example of children, and Luke even uses the Greek word for infant. These are very young kids and babies that are being brought to Jesus. So He uses this as a moment to teach a valuable lesson.
Babies show their humility in their inability to provide for themselves. Every child that is born is completely dependent on its parents and has a wholehearted trust in them to provide what they need. What does it mean to be a Christian? It means being humble enough to admit that we need God. It means we trust in God, rather than our own “power.”
Humility plays an important role in every aspect of Christianity. It helps with showing love to others, it helps us subject ourselves to God’s Word, it helps us treat others the way we want to be treated, it helps us accept the hard topics that scripture contains, and the list goes on and on.
Do you want to be a part of the Kingdom? Make humility an everyday practice. That is what it means to be a Christian.
When I was younger I liked to play basketball and so I decided to play for a team so after joining the team the coach would cuss and give us a piece of his mind when he was mad. And of course being in the church my whole life and hearing him cuss made me mad so I quit. So I got bored after a while, not having anything to do so I decided to play football. And within a week of starting the coach started to cuss big time. So eventually I realized I was slowly being introduced to the world. In 1 John 2:15 we read that we should not love the world or the things in it. Also in Ephesians 4:20-32 we read of a new man versus the old man. The old man grows corrupt according to the deceitful lust. It reads, “But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, putting away lying, “Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,” for we are members of one another. Be angry, and do not sin: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give [a]place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.” I once read a story about two girls that ran away from home. They were in a little alleyway between two buildings. One girl looked at the other and said tell me why you are here. She said I ran away from home because the rules are so strict but I kind of miss my parents. So the other girl looked her right in the eyes and said why don’t you go back home? She looked at her right in the eyes and said I don’t know where home is. If you don’t know where home is, please get right with the Lord.
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