So 2020’s just done me in with covid-19 and a severe chronic constipation.

There are plenty of ramifications in the pair; I only wish I could halve her pain.

Or that it’d be much shorter, and that there’s a way out of it — a cure of some sort.

At least a clear management plan when anxiety was high and all the possible prognoses were thrown around.

Nine months have passed; we’re nowhere out of the woods — but could I please take her plate, stand in her shoes?

My mama heart keeps reflecting on how covid-19 and a chronic illness sometimes run parallel. The quality of your life, your mobility, and the ability to socialise are impacted.

Life is precarious, and should the reality of a deadly pandemic and a disheartening prognosis hits your home harder than the usual, may I encourage you with this:

“Christ Over All Our Concerns”

Who can control our world today?

I can’t even accelerate the process of her healing, undo the past, father my abandoned days, or save myself from utter disappointment. But here I’m learning to reclaim my broken days, recognise God turning every corner of pain into purpose, singing my way through the harsh.

Yeah, we can still give thanks in difficult days , live past our ideals into a reality that liberates, and the love that never forsakes.

When I’m concerned about my concerns, I love what Dr Snyder wrote when he quoted CS Lewis —

“When the atomic age dawned in 1945, the utter devastation of such a bomb awed the world, and many were driven to a fear that the entire world might be destroyed. C. S. Lewis lived through that initial shock but didn’t allow the fear to grip him.

In an essay written in 1948, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” he brought his common-sense Christian mind to the topic.”

How should one live in an atomic age, he asks? “I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’”

CS Lewis

Even now when our world is messy, and there are threats of dangers and sickness abounding, our Christian common sense can always prevail.

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. . . .

It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

CS Lewis

There is a way to live through fears that does not cripple you but strengthens you. 

We can combat our concerns and confidently centre on Christ who’d always pull us through.

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts —

…not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

CS Lewis

And so, this is what we can do —

We can magnify daily joy and keep it as the epicentre of our living.

We can hit the kitchen, bake another round of cookies, welcome friends and strangers who are struggling under their own stress and strain, and let our little calm soothe the world’s huge chaos — even if just a bit — we will huddle over each other for read-alouds till our hearts ripen too for revivals.

Every day we’ll make memories, create memorials, and laugh over jokes no matter how lame, and remember always the goodness of our God because as Lewis wrote, “They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.“=

Because we believe deep in our heart that these are Esther moments.

That God has a story and a grand narrative. That ours is a song of redemption, a symphony of resurrection, and the Prince of Peace holding us, very still, very safe…

“If there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside nature, Lewis notes, “then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return.”

That, however, is not the Christian vision of what life is. We are not just a “meaningless play of atoms in space and time . . . that by a series of hundredth chances . . . has (regrettably) produced things like ourselves.”

C.S Lewis