Covid-19 and the generational pivot

CV-19 and a generational pivot

As the Covid-19 pandemic widens, life changes in ways unimaginable a month or so back. While the still-living dig graves for the dead and settle to prolonged hibernation we ask how long this will last and how will we survive.

Is this also a time to think of what happens next? What will life be like after the virus runs its course?

An episode from Biblical history can help frame the discussion.

In about 587BC the nation of Israel fell captive to a Babylon invasion.  Old certainties disappeared. Jerusalem became a wasteland and the great national symbol of God’s presence became building rubble with the fall of the temple. The population was decimated. The dead were left to bury themselves and the living were sent to Babylon, Egypt and elsewhere. The land, people and blessing promised to Abraham were only memories (Gen 12:1-2).

What next?

Some hung their harps on the poplars, refused to sing and surrendered to bitter thoughts of vengeance (Ps 137). This may well represent a failure to face the new reality and a futile captivity to the past.

Others did differently.

Daniel flourished as he both served his captors and remained true to his Lord (somewhat like Joseph in an earlier time). This is an example of blooming where you are planted and making the most of adversity. And so, we read of a florist whose flowers became compost as she adapted her home delivery business so that carrots replaced camellias and radishes replaced roses.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel were two of God’s spokesman who suffered with their fellow Israelites and went into exile. Jeremiah’s already difficult life was compounded such that he wrote a book whose very title evokes a tear: Lamentations. Yet even there we find a great word of hope and expectation as he speaks of new daily mercies from the Lord which prompted a personal ‘waiting’ on him (Lament 3:23-24).

More and better was to come.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel were inspired by the Sprit to see an ‘over the horizon’ pivot point when the Lord would do something remarkably new. Ezekiel speaks of the valley of dry bones being restored to life by the breath of God and a new future for Israel under a new king (Ezek 37). Jeremiah was given a remarkable vision when Israel would again be ‘my people’ (Jer 31:1) and when the Lord’s everlasting love (Jer 31:3) would result not just in restoration but in a stunning new covenant (Jer 31:31).

Get it? Under God, the crisis of judgment was to become the pivot point to a new and different future that went way beyond restoring the past.

People started returning to their country about 50 years after the fall of Jerusalem. However, this was a tiny triumph as they returned to a still-conquered land only by permission of a foreign power, struggled to re-establish life and took forever to build a new temple that was a faint shadow of its predecessor (see Ezra and Nehemiah). Far from being a pivot moment, this was a half-start. The pivot was to come about 500 years later with the advent of Jesus who is the fulfilment of all God’s promises (2 Cor 1:19-20) and the inaugurator of the long-promised kingdom that made mighty King David look like a village Mayor. Grace pivoted divine judgment into the redemptive moment.

Is Covid-19 the opportunity of such a generational pivot moment on a collective and personal level?

I am not suggesting that Covid-19 is equivalent to the fall of Jerusalem in terms of God’s judgment and covenant making (although the aspect of judgement in Covid-19 deserves careful attention). However, there is room to see some parallels of events and process.

What responses can we make to Covid-19? Several possibilities suggest themselves.

• We can hang our harps and be consumed by bitterness as we realise that the past will never return.

• We can choose to engage with the new normal and thrive like a Daniel.

• Or we can, under God, imagineeer a new and different future. This is the  opportunity to pivot.

• And so, the pastor of a long-established church who sees a generational opportunity to use the shutdown to think through what a re-booted church could look like and to plan for it.

• Or the bank CEO who remarks that things cannot be the same in his business and who dares to imagine the future.

• Or the schools now forced into virtual learning and who ask how they can shape new blended pedagogies to serve the future.

• Or the families who ask how they can reshape their relationships into healthier forms.

• Or the individuals who ask what old constraining patterns can be jettisoned for a good new growth curve.

Here are a few starter questions to help find the pivot:

• What are the significant aspects in what I now do?
• What are the defaults in those aspects?
• How do those defaults stand up to scrutiny?
• What new habits or patterns could replace the present defaults?

• Should some of these aspects of life be discarded, replaced or changed in their relative weight?

• Are there whole new things to be doing with my life?

Of course, for Christian people and organisations, these are not questions to ask by ourselves lest we self-construct a new Babel that collapses like the tower of Siloam. Rather, as we imagineer the post CV-19 pivot it is a time to be humble and ask what the Lord desires.

This is not a time to be consumed by nostalgia for the past or fatalistic about the future. Rather it is a time, under God, to ask what the future can hold.

As a poem puts it;

Let life rejoice in what is and can be

And regret not

what could, but should not be

Or, what was and should not have been.