The antidote for despair
by David Robertson, theweeflea:
How are you feeling? Sometimes Christians struggle both at a personal and a corporate level when faced with the challenges to faith that a crisis like Covid-19 brings.
Camus, in his classic novel, The Plague, describes the agony of a priest trying to come to terms with the horrible death of a child. In such circumstances one of the key questions that Christians seek to answer is: where is God in all of this? The answers fly out from the keyboards and on the airwaves. ‘It’s a judgement.’ ‘It’s a sign.’ ‘It’s neither a judgement or a sign. ”God is not involved – he’s just weeping and asking us to remember his Son and do good.’
My question is the one that Jeremiah asked: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wounds of my people” (Jeremiah 8:22).
The book of Revelation ends by telling us that the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. Where are those leaves? This week, although I didn’t discover the vaccine for Covid-19, I did discover a medicine far more precious – something to heal ‘the sin sick soul’.
For me, the Covid crisis is not the only, nor even the major reason for what the 17th century Cambridge pastor, Richard Sibbes, calls ‘The Soul’s Conflict’. In his book of the same name, he gives some deep, beautiful and very helpful guidelines as we wrestle within ourselves when faced with difficult circumstances and daunting questions.
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