Feeling Weary in These Waning Pandemic Days? How Do You Move Forward, Even Regain Your Joy? Here's How.

I saw the headline this week, and my heart sank.   I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was likely true.  What was the headline?   Herd immunity won’t happen.  We can’t outrun the virus.   We’ll manage it sure, but we’ll have to live with it for a while to come.  But I don’t want to live with it.   

A day later, I was talking with a friend.  We were leaving a meeting that, for the first time in over a year, had actually been in person.  And he said something like.  “Well, it won’t be the same, but we’ll make it through.”    But I do want it to be the same.  Ok, well maybe not exactly the same (Zoom meetings can be really convenient), but close to it. 

But the reality is that what he was saying was right.  And facing that reality, it’s hard.  Millions have lost people they loved.   Everyone has lost something.  Some lost jobs or businesses.  Everyone lost time with family.  Everyone has lost a sense of security.  Remember when you didn’t even think about being in a crowded grocery store aisle?  Remember when you didn’t feel nervous just going to eat in a restaurant?  Boy, those were the days!   

And coping with those losses, well, as a nation we’re not doing so well.   Even before the pandemic drug overdoses were 4 times higher than they were less than 20 years ago.  And now they’ve grown worse.   We were already facing what a former surgeon general called an epidemic of loneliness.  And now that’s worse too.   Before the pandemic, 1 in 10 said they struggled with anxiety and depression.  Now 4 out of 10 do.  The younger you go, the worst it gets.   For those 65 and over, 29% suffer depression and anxiety.  But for those between 50 and 64, it goes to 39%.   For those 25 to 49, it goes higher to 49%.   And for those 18 to 24, it hits over 56%.    Do you get what that means?  If you see two people walking down the street and they’re under 50, and you made a bet that one of them is struggling with serious depression and anxiety, you’d win almost every time.  

This pandemic has hit us hard, and it’s not through with us just yet.   But how do you cope with that heat, the heat of these days of anxiety, of weariness and grief, of sheer emotional exhaustion? How do you find a way to live with joy and hope in these days?   In times like these, we need the words we’re about to hear more than ever.  

In the words of this letter, Peter, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, compares what his hearers are facing to not just heat but a furnace.  What do you do, when it gets that hot, that it’s not only hard, it’s dangerous, even deadly?  How do you come through that heat not only intact, but even stronger and better than before?  In these words, God begins to show the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.  

1 Peter 1:1-5

So, how do you thrive in the heat of these days, these not over the Pandemic yet days?   In these opening words, God shows you the way.   God tells you.   To thrive in these days, to beat this heat, you need to remember this.  You need to remember who and whose you are.   And before we get to what that phrase exactly means, we need to talk first about why everyone needs it.

Years ago, a brilliant writer, David Foster Wallace, gave a commencement address that I never get tired of quoting.   Wallace called his address. “This is Water.” And he opened with that old joke.  It goes like this.  Two young fish were swimming along when an old fish called out.  “Howdy, young’ uns!  How’s the water?”  The young fish just kept swimming along. Then one asked, puzzled.  “What the heck is water?”   And Wallace got the profound point behind the joke.  Every day we swim in stuff that we don’t even see but that can give us life or poison us.   And what did Wallace mean by this water?  He meant, strangely enough, for a man who didn’t adhere to any organized religion, worship.  Here is how he put it.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.  And the compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…Worship power, you will up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.  Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.  But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is…. they’re unconscious.  They are default settings.

Do you see what he meant by worship?  He meant this.  What defines your identity?  How do you measure your value, your worth, your meaning?    And he might have been too charitable on the spiritual stuff because that can become toxic too.   If you worship a God who is more a scary boss than a loving mother or father, that’s not so good.  But what he was pointing to remains profoundly true.  If you ground your identity in something that cannot be shaken, that doesn’t depend on your circumstances or your popularity or even how you are feeling that day, well, that’s a pretty powerful foundation.  

And that’s what Peter does as he opens this letter, he lays that sort of foundation.    And the folks who got this letter needed that foundation more than ever.  The Roman’s tolerance for Christians had now become hostility.  Violent persecution could erupt almost anywhere, at any time.  And these folks were feeling that heat, feeling like besieged exiles, strangers, in their own lands.  

So, before Peter does anything else.   He lays the foundation.  This is who you are.  This is whose you are.   And those words didn’t just carry power then.  They carry power now.  So, let’s take a few minutes to unpack them. 

First, Peter tells them.  God chose you.  God chose you before you even existed.   And do you see what that tells you?   Your belonging to God doesn’t depend on you.   It depends on God.   God picked you, and because God picked you, God will never walk away from you.  God will never disown you.   You have become God’s beloved child now and forever.   And he points to a famous story from the past to bring that point home. 

When God freed the Israelites from slavery, he made a sacred agreement, a covenant with them.   And to seal that covenant, he sealed it in blood.   For human beings, there’s something about blood.  When you’re a kid, and you want to seal the relationship with your best buddy, what do you do?  You use the blood.  You make a little nick in your fingers and your bond forms.  You are now blood brothers.  

And God, does that with the Israelites, literally.   In the book of Exodus, after their leaders offer the ritual animal sacrifice, they take some of that blood, and literally sprinkle it on the people.   God is saying to them.  I am committed to you with my very blood, my very life.  That’s how unshakeable my bond with you is.    And these followers of Jesus know.  In Jesus, God lived out that very promise.   In Jesus’ death, God had sprinkled them with God’s very blood.  

And when you know God is committed like that to you, it’s pretty powerful.  But is it enough to know God died for you like that?  No, not really.   If God died for you and that’s it, yes, you’ve got a nice memory of God, but not much more.

But of course, Peter says, you don’t just have a memory.  You have a living reality.   Jesus rose.  And when Jesus rose, Peter says, you rose in him.   These words new birth don’t really get at what Peter is saying.   No, in Jesus, Peter is saying, God begat you again.   In other words, in that resurrection, you were conceived again.  You became something radically and wonderfully new.   And in this regeneration, you have a living hope, one that not even death can kill.

And if you have a hope like that, it gives a powerful perspective, even in the face of immense loss.  It’s why this poem that I first read last week touched me so.  Maybe you’ve heard it before. It is a Christian poem about death.   It goes like this.

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side,
spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck
of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then, someone at my side says, "There, she is gone"
Gone where?
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,
hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me -- not in her.
And, just at the moment when someone says, "There, she is gone,"
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices
ready to take up the glad shout, "Here she comes!"

I love that, “Here she comes!”   But is that enough to get you through the heat?  It helps, but is it enough?   No, you need more.   And in the final words here, Peter provides it.  He says this living hope not only protects you when you die, it protects you right now.  And when Peter says protect, he uses a word that means protected by a veritable fortress.  How can a living hope protect you like that?

The preacher Tim Keller had an old friend named Archie.  He first got to know Archie in the nineties, when a guy named Roger Staubach, quarterbacked the Dallas Cowboys.  Archie loved the Cowboys, but the games stressed him out.  In those days, the Cowboys won a lot, but they often had to come from behind.  And all that uncertainty stressed poor Archie right out. 

Then Archie went into the military and got deployed to Asia.  But now when the Armed Forces Network showed the games, Archie didn’t stress at all.   The Cowboys would fall behind, but Archie was cool.   What had changed?  Now, he knew the final score.  The network always showed the game a day later.  So, no matter what happened, Archie was ok.  He knew the final score.  He knew in the end, no matter what happened, the Cowboys would come out on top. 

And that’s what Peter does here.  He gives the final score.  He tells them. You may not see it yet.  In fact, you may not see it completely in your lifetime.  But you have the end of the story.    In the end, God wins.  Love wins.  Hope wins.   Goodness wins.   And when you know that you have a fortress that can withstand anything. 

During the Vietnam War, Admiral Jim Stockdale became the highest-ranking prisoner in the POW camp, known as the Hanoi Hilton.  Tortured over twenty times in his eight years there, he not only survived, but became a legendary leader of the prisoners. How did he do it? 

In an interview with the writer Jim Collins, he shared his paradox, the paradox that got him through.  He said.  “I never lost faith in the end of the story.”  He believed that somehow, some way he would get through this, even come out stronger on the other side.  Collins then asked.  “Well, who didn’t make it out?”  And Stockdale said.   Oh, that’s easy, the optimists.”  Collins puzzled asked him to explain more. 

Stockdale said:  “The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Then he turned to Collins and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be, - in other words -the Stockdale paradox.

But long before Stockdale discovered it, Peter knew it well.  And in his words, God is telling it to you.   You may feel the heat of these days, even feel like an exile in a strange new world.  But you can know that’s not the ultimate end of the story. God’s love is the end of the story, of your story, of every story.   No matter how long and winding and uncertain the journey is along the way, you know the end.  This story ends, not in death but in life, not in despair, but in joy.  You have a living hope.  And in that hope, you can find light on even the darkest of days.  Live in that hope.  Remember who you are.  Remember whose you are.   And remember always, the end of the story, an end so certain that no loss, no setback will defeat it, not even death itself.