Quote of the week…“Happiness is inward not outward; and so it does not depend on what we have, but on what we

are.” —CC—

These are challenging times. We must remember that even though it seems the world is crumbling, we don’t have to be a crumb in the midst of the crumbling.

I am reminded of a story I read several years ago shared by Stan Toler.

David Hopkins felt as if the eyes of a thousand demons penetrated his soul as he walked across the campus of Emanuel College in Franklin Springs, Georgia. Thousands of beadyeyed buzzards arrogantly shifted along the bare tree limbs as if they were waiting for him to drop dead and furnish them lunch. My friend Dr. Hopkins, the college president, said his skin crawled as he thought about the sic years of torture that had come from the predators who had arrived regularly in October and lingered until April, infesting the college property.

With the crunch of his every footstep on the leaf-strewn ground, he relived the staff’s repeated efforts to scare away the birds. Devoted employees tried banging pots and pans—and even firing warning shots into the air. Nothing worked. And killing the ebony beasts was against the law. According to local officials the tormentors were endangered. Destroying them would result in a hefty fi ne. The cold autumn wind tearing at the trees seemed to mock Dr. Hopkins, and he was certain one swooping buzzard grinned with glee!

Indeed, the buzzards seemed a metaphor for the spiritual warfare of the last six years. As the winged menaces invaded the school, year in and year out, David’s wife almost died of cancer. He suffered from the sometimes-fatal Crohn’s disease. The college, in the throes of necessary but diffi cult change, struggled for fi nancial survival. Dr. Hopkins wondered if and when the buzzards would smell the death of the college and swoop. He shook his fi st toward the feathered foes and declared, “You won’t win!”

Yet just when it looked like he was fi nished, twenty-fi ve prayer warriors arrived on the campus to pray for the college— and for the rapid departure of the carnivorous creatures. The next day, Dr. Hopkins received a call from a donor who said, “I’ll give $160,000 toward the construction of the new science building!” What’s more, his wife was declared cancer free!

President Hopkins told me that he was so happy about the news that he nearly “floated home,” That’s when he made a startling discovery. As he looked around, he noticed the trees were void of those dark adversaries. No buzzards! Gone! Gone! Gone! For no apparent reason, they had vanished! At that moment, he recalled Abraham’s sojourn from Ur to the Promised Land. Abraham had paused to worship and to offer a sacrifice to God as a symbol of his covenant to be obedient, regardless of circumstances! (It should be noted: The buzzards came down to steal Abraham’s sacrifice before he could seal it. Abraham had to shoo the winged predators away!)

Someday, you’re going to spot buzzards circling in your spiritual “No-Fly Zone.” There is going to come a time when you’re hit with a crisis, one that you didn’t see coming. And it may cause your whole world to crumble like an old cookie that’s met with a big sledgehammer. But take heart; you don’t have to be a crumb in the midst of the crumbling.

So, remember as we travel from one hysteria to another hysteria that we don’t have to be a crumb in a crumbling world. We have too much going for us. The fact is, God is in control of the confusion. His wise providence and His gracious mercy are only a prayer away. What’s more, we have God’s promises right at hand.

What’s more, we have God’s promises right at hand. Look for the good news in God’s Word. Search for the eternal wisdom in the face of earthly adversity. Take a great big drink from the water that never runs dry, even when we are walking through the desert. The news is mostly good. God has promised to equip us for the journey up our mountain. And He’ll not only equip us, He’ll go with us.

We will survive!

The Buzzards Are Circling by Stan Toler

—CC—

A Coronavirus Great Awakening? Sometimes the most important ingredient for spiritual renewal is a cataclysmic event.

Could a plague of biblical proportions be America’s best hope for religious revival? As the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, there is reason to think so.

Three-quarters of a century has dimmed the memory of that gruesome conflict and its terrible consequences: tens of millions killed, great cities bombed to rubble, Europe and Asia stricken by hunger and poverty. Those who survived the war had to grapple with the kinds of profound questions that only arise in the aftermath of calamity. Gazing at the ruins from his window at Cambridge University, British historian Herbert Butterfield chose to make sense of it by turning to the Hebrew Bible.

“The power of the Old Testament teaching on history—perhaps the point at which the ancient Jews were most original, breaking away from the religious thought of the other peoples around them— lay precisely in the region of truths which sprang from a reflection on catastrophe and cataclysm,” Butterfield wrote in “Christianity and History” (1949). “It is almost impossible properly to appreciate the higher developments in the historical reflection of the Old Testament except in another age which has experienced (or has found itself confronted with) colossal cataclysm.”

Americans, chastened by the horrors of war, turned to faith in search of truth and meaning. In the late 1940s, Gallup surveys showed more than three-quarters of Americans were members of a house of worship, compared with about half today. Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. Some would later call this a Third Great Awakening.

Today the world faces another moment of cataclysm. Though less devastating than World War II, the pandemic has remade everyday life and wrecked the global economy in a way that feels apocalyptic.

The experience is new and disorienting. Life had been deceptively easy until now. Our ancestors’ lives, by contrast, were guaranteed to be short and painful. The lucky ones survived birth. The luckier ones made it past childhood. Only in the past 200 years has humanity truly taken off. We now float through an anomalous world of air conditioning, 911 call centers, acetaminophen and pocket-size computers containing nearly the sum of human knowledge. We reduced nature to “the shackled form of a conquered monster,” as Joseph Conrad once put it, and took control of our fate. God became irrelevant.

Who will save us now that the monster has broken free?

“Men may live to a great age in days of comparative quietness and peaceful progress, without ever having come to grips with the universe, without ever vividly realizing the problems and the paradoxes with which human history so often confronts us,” Butterfield wrote. “We of the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled; for the men of the Old Testament, the ancient Greeks and all our ancestors down to the seventeenth century betray in their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man’s existence in this risky universe.”

The past four years have been some of the most contentious and embarrassing in American history. Squabbling over trivialities has left the public frantic and divided, oblivious to the transcendent. But the pandemic has humbled the country and opened millions of eyes to this risky universe once more.

“Sheer grimness of suffering brings men sometimes into a profounder understanding of human destiny,” Butterfield wrote. Sometimes “it is only by a cataclysm,” he continued, “that man can make his escape from the net which he has taken so much trouble to weave around himself.”

For societies founded on the biblical tradition, cataclysms need not mark the end. They are a call for repentance and revival. As the coronavirus pandemic subjects U.S. hospitals to a fearsome test, Americans can find solace in the same place that Butterfield did. Great struggle can produce great clarity.

“The ancient Hebrews, by virtue of inner resources and unparalleled leadership, turned their tragedy, turned their very helplessness, into one of the half-dozen creative moments in world history,” Butterfield wrote. “It would seem that one of the clearest and most concrete of the facts of history is the fact that men of spiritual resources may not only redeem catastrophe but turn it into a grand creative moment.”

Could a rogue virus lead to a grand creative moment in America’s history? Will Americans, shaken by the reality of a risky universe, rediscover the God who proclaimed himself sovereign over every catastrophe?

HOUSES OF WORSHIP ROBERT NICHOLSON Mr. Nicholson is president of the Philos Project.

—CC—