Praying Through CoronavirusSample

### Courage in a time of containment Today I am reflecting on God’s commandment to be strong and courageous when I am tempted to hide away and ride out the storm. Coronavirus began, of course, in China where the word for crisis is made up of two characters: the first means ‘danger’ and the second means’ opportunity’. The danger of this crisis is very real. Everyone is affected in some way. Hundreds of thousands are likely to die. Millions are losing their jobs. The world is heading for recession. It’s important therefore that we heed the advice of our political leaders and our medical experts for the sake of the most vulnerable in our world. But this crisis is also an opportunity for the people of God to ‘be strong and courageous’, to show his love to a world that is being shaken to its core. In the year 251AD a plague decimated the great city of Carthage. Its citizens were ‘shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion’. Carcases piled up in the streets.  In a famous sermon on Matthew 5:43-48, the great Church Father Cyprian urged the church to stay in the city to care not just for other Christians but for their non-Christian neighbours too, who had recently been persecuting them. Rodney Stark, in a fascinating book ‘Epidemics, Networks and the Rise of Christianity’ observes that: ‘The minority Christian community, which did not flee but stayed to provide nursing, had a higher survival rate than their pagan neighbours; and the pagans who had been nursed through the crisis by Christians were likely to be open to a faith that, unlike their own, had worked.’ I ask the Lord to give me courage in spite of my nerves to reach out to other people today, and to bring to my attention now any specific people to whom he is sending me. Pause and pray I take time now to pray for my political and spiritual leaders that they may have wisdom beyond their own wisdom, and strength beyond their own strength to take a lead in this crisis. Pause and pray This is an unusual time of constraint and containment when the natural human impulse is towards self-preservation - mere survival. But this season of confinement may also be a great blessing. Eugene Peterson writing about Jonah’s confinement in the belly of a whale, says this: ‘Without confinement, without the intensification resulting from compression, there is no energy worth speaking of… Confined to the reality of the human condition, the person is surprised to be living not a diminished life but a deepened life, not a crippled life but a zestful life.’ Lord I ask that I would be deepened and not diminished, emboldened and not terrified, by the pressures of this crisis for the sake of those who don’t yet know your love. Pause and pray At this time of so much disruption and dismay I take hold of God’s promise in Isaiah 41, drawing consolation for the day to come from this beautiful assurance: Hear the Word of the Lord: ‘Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’