Nov 1, 2020
By Kevin Butler
Conference President 2021
While video chatting with our granddaughters, they couldn’t wait to show Papa and Grandma their new refrigerator with a shiny stainless steel finish.
After oohing and aahing, I said, “Wow, it sure looks nice, but it’s kind of bare! What are you going to put on it?”
Leah rushed out of view to find their dry erase activity board, the one with magnets that stuck to the old fridge. She slapped the white board up against the new metal and proudly announced, “There!!”
The calendar was a good addition. But as we watched, the board started to tip and slowly slide down the appliance, like a sinking cruise ship. We all started laughing as our daughter’s little “Mini Me” screamed and rushed to push the calendar back up. It repeated its slow-motion trip downward.
“Looks like you need stronger magnets!”
We have a similar magnetic calendar on the side of our fridge. It’s a generic fill-in-the-month with dates and activities. As with many other planners for the middle part of this year, the white surface saw NO changes. It might as well have slid out of sight.
During the height of the pandemic, no activities or appointments needed to be chronicled. Everything was cancelled. It was like, “Why even have this calendar?”
Starting in September, we actually began to use the neglected planner. We scheduled some in-state getaways where we could leave home to enjoy them. Sure, we were vigilant in wearing our masks, sanitizing and social distancing. Life was getting closer to normal.
It felt like the calendar and our lives were being restored.
Once we get past this pandemic, and our personal and church lives resume a level of normalcy, what will we have learned? Will we simply “pick up where we left off” during the early days of 2020?
We may feel and be restored, but for what purpose? Just to resume our old schedules and get back to the old routine? What will we have learned? What lessons will we carry with us once the coronavirus is behind us?
God is in the business of changing lives—of restoring those who come to Him for help.
Our churches and our Conference workers stepped up to make sure that people could stay connected when we could not meet physically.
What have we learned? Have we seen the importance of “touch” in a time when we had to maintain physical and social separation?
When we are restored from this time, we must ask the question: Why? Why has God restored us? We must ponder and be thankful for the immediate result, then pursue the long-term answer.
Yes, we will be restored to hug each other and rekindle our face-to-face fellowship. There will be great joy in that.
What does the long-range restoration look like? Will we remember how things felt when we had to remain separate, and think of the homebound where every day was a stay-at-home quarantine? Will we think of those who are not among our number spiritually, and will be quarantined from God and His heavenly home forever?
There will be immediate benefits to the lifting of physical restrictions. What about those under spiritual restrictions? May we be the salt and light to shine the Gospel and soften hearts, that they may be restored eternally and not slowly sink out of view.
