We’re keeping it brief this month.
Before sending this letter, I looked over your names and thought about your current seasons of life. Some of you are planning for or adjusting to marriages and babies and new degree programs and other huge changes. Some of you are doing the same deal you’ve been doing for a while. Some of you just sent your kids to school, or are keeping them home for school. Some of you are caring for your kids’ kids, and others of you are tending to your roommates, your jobs, and your health. Oftentimes simultaneously.
Some of you are digging it. Some of you are not.
Regardless, in month-number-whatever of the pandemic, I’m guessing that we’re all just trying to do our best. I don’t mean that in a resigned, grumpy, or self-sufficient bootstraps sense.
Rather, I wonder if we’re getting slightly more comfortable with not knowing what’s happening six weeks from now. If we’re being slightly more gracious with ourselves when we forget butter at the store and slightly more aware that other people forget butter, too.
Let us keep on growing, learning, adapting, celebrating, lamenting, confessing, enjoying, and communing, even if those things are happening at a pace we did not expect or do not prefer.
I wrote this in a Deeply Rooted newsletter a few months ago and pray that you sense God’s strong, kind, and all-sufficient nearness today and as long as this season lasts. And then longer.
“As we grieve the ways creation groans for the Lord’s redemption (Rom. 8:18–25), we are wise to remember where our ultimate help comes from and that we are little children in the arms of a sufficient Father. The believer in the age of coronavirus can take heart–the same God who knows each in his flock by name and gave his life for them is also the One who holds all things together (John 10:1–18; Col. 1:17).”
Mallory R. Manning 