Many of us receive Word and Deed e-mails from the medical group in Burundi. Eric McLaughlin, who spoke at our retreat in 2018 (see our Dec 2018 newsletter), wrote a recent post which I felt was very appropriate for this time in our nation. He has granted permission to reprint it here.
In addition, the book which he talked about publishing is now available at Amazon: Promises in the Dark: Walking with Those in Need Without Losing Heart
Those of us who attended the 2018 retreat will want to read more about the subject and those who were not able to attend should even more order it. This short piece from Word and Deed is a sample of the wisdom and vision God has given him. As we pray for our own country in this epidemic, pray also for Burundi, and the rest of Africa. This virus could be even more devastating there.
By: Eric McLaughlin, M.D.
Original Post
We are living in a time of loss. And so are you, fellow inhabitant of planet Earth. This season is not what anyone predicted. We cannot go where we thought we could go. We cannot do what we thought we were doing. We cannot be with those whom we thought to spend time. We do not know when things will change, which makes any significant planning nearly impossible. Early February has this amazing nostalgia. The glory of that ordinary life - we knew it not. May we know it better when it returns.
Watching people all over the world grapple with this time of loss has shown me two seemingly contradictory responses:
First, there is an increased call for the importance of lament. Articles such as NT Wright’s and different books (including my own) have been sources of resonance for a lot of people. Lament is indeed a gift to us in times like our own. We don’t have answers, and we don’t know yet when answers will be forthcoming. Our normal means of decision-making and anxiety-mitigation have been stripped from us by the utterly unprecedented nature of the global COVID- 19 pandemic. We don’t know what to do.
Here, lament gives us the words and even the emotional stance that we need. We cry out to God. We pour out our complaint. We ask “How long?” as more than a rhetorical question. We don’t understand, but can at least know to whom our complaint is rightly addressed. We do better to take the ugliest thought to God than the most cleaned-up thought anywhere else. “We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” (2 Chronicles 20:12)
The second response is one of celebration and beauty. As our normal life becomes restricted, and in many places slows down, there is a need to find some form of celebration. People write notes to each other. You may have seen more longtime friends on Zoom in the past couple of weeks than you have in years. Yesterday, my wife walked through our house loudly singing Les Miserables tunes (“One day more!”) and the kids joined in. The joy and the beauty are a defiance of the fear and the darkness, and this is as it should be.
I have loved watching the art and the music that Covid sequestration has already birthed. My med school classmates are posting brilliant dual-piano pieces that they are playing together despite being a time zone apart. Our team intern’s watercolors of a beautiful JRR Tolkien quote are circulating on social media. I can’t remember when the beauty of American spring was so celebrated in photos. The human creative spirit inside all of us, which is part of humanity’s role as image bearers of a creative God, has hardly ever been so evident. We need this.
So we find that we need to lament this loss. And we find that we need to fill the void of this loss with a celebration of beauty. And it feels impossible to do both of these together. Give me one or the other, and some kind of path is laid before me. But both? I can feel my feet sticking to the ground.