Day 1: Not on our terms

Liminal dispatch, 03.17.20

[God says]: “I don’t think the way you think. The way you work is not the way I work.”
Isaiah 55: 8 (MSG)

In a time of crisis, we are being asked to live — and even to think — in an entirely new way.

What’s more, the crisis visits at a most inconvenient time (is there ever a convenient time for crisis?). This is a season drenched in our old well-worn ways of doing things: parades, boozy crowds, grandeur, baskets of candy, triumphant processionals, our Sunday finest, shoulder-to-shoulder cheering, sunny escapes of many varieties.

Now we’re being asked to set all of this easy familiarity aside, for an indefinite and unspecified amount of time, and — here’s the kicker — it’s not even for ourselves. We’re being asked to give all these certainties up for the sake of other people. People who work in hospitals and clinics. People who are vulnerable in ways that make us uncomfortable. People we don’t even know and may never, ever see. People who might be like us … or might not.

I’m not sure we fully appreciate how radically different this is from the way we normally do things in our culture, in our lives. There is no system in our country — not the economy, not the government, not the institutional church, not the justice system — that is set up to encourage us to live like this.