I had three touches with history over the Memorial Day weekend. I wasn’t looking for them, but there they were anyway.

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The first was a book I read over the weekend called The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021).

Good news continues to flow in on the COVID-19 front here in The United States. As of Tuesday, June 8, 2021, hospitalizations across the country are down to 16,835 and 171,731,584 Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine.

In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says the news “is even better than you’ve heard.”

He writes that “80 to 85 percent of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection.”

Obviously, eradication of the disease would be even better but, “With more than 8 in 10 adults protected from either contracting or transmitting the virus it can’t readily propagate by jumping around in the population.” This is what is referred to as herd immunity. This “should speed up the timeline for returning fully to normal.”

If natural immunity is not factored in, then “we are far from Anthony Fauci’s stated target of 70% to 85% of the population becoming immune through full vaccination. But,” Mackary continues, “the effect of natural immunity is all around us” as evidenced in “plummeting case numbers.”

The really good news is for those who have been infected. Now, this is an opinion piece, but Dr. Mackary points out, “After treating Covid for 16 months, we haven’t seen significant incidence of re-infection.”

One question he takes on: “Should the previously infected be vaccinated?” His “clinical advice to healthy patients with natural immunity is that one shot is sufficient, and maybe not even necessary, although it could increase the long-term durability of immunity.”

Those who have had the infection but haven’t been vaccinated are in kind of a strange status. You’re probably safe for a time from re-infection or infecting others, but you’re not in the category of people who are told they no longer need masks. This article is helpful information for those thinking through this issue.

Related to this topic, on Sunday afternoon I finished a phenomenal book, The Premonition by Michael Lewis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021).

If you haven’t read any of Lewis’ books, it’s likely you’ve seen one of the movies based on them, Moneyball or The Blind Side. (The books are ALWAYS better than the movies.) He writes so well you can hardly help yourself but continue reading.

Side note: There is a blurb on the dust jacket of The Premonition offering “Praise for Michael Lewis.” In a piece for New York Times Book Review, John Williams wrote, “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.” That’s about right.

This book reads like a thriller, but it is a work of non-fiction. It is about COVID-19, but it begins back in the administration of President George W. Bush.

The story goes that Mr. Bush went on a vacation in 2005 and read John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2018). It scared Mr. Bush who convened a group in The White House to gauge preparedness for an outbreak of a disease as deadly as the Spanish Flu of 1918. The result was a group of people got together in the Bush years to create a plan.

The book tells the story of close calls—the swine influenza outbreak of 2009 figures prominently in the story. It is called “the pandemic that wasn’t.” Drug-resistant tuberculosis is also part of this story. This is pretty alarming, to say the least. And one thing you learn along the way is that public health officials have a lot of power and a lot of responsibility when it comes to dealing with deadly infections. It feels like a bit of a no-win for them. If they don’t react, people could die. But if they do impose sanctions, then they are taking away freedoms.

The Premonition is not what I expected. I thought somehow it would be about the people we hear in the news all the time. But the most important people in the fight against COVID-19 were people I had never heard of. It’s inspiring to read about these individuals who are so smart and so concerned about solving problems. The CDC features in the story, but they are almost a distraction from and for the protagonists.

Lewis’ book answers some of the questions I’ve had. For example, Where did this idea of “social distancing” come from? The answer is there is “no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network.” Makes sense.

Another question: Why close the schools? When you are modeling the spread of disease, “One intervention was not like the others . . . when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff.” (It doesn’t come out in the book, but as it turns out, with COVID-19 this wasn’t that important of an intervention.)

There’s a great analogy in the book. When it comes to pandemics, there is no one thing that you can do that works. An intervention is like a piece of Swiss cheese. You need multiple interventions. If you layer enough pieces of Swiss cheese interventions on top of each other, now you have the ability to prevent things.

We learn the importance of the early moments when you’re dealing with communicable disease. One California public health official who figured prominently in this story says “ninety percent of the battle is in the first few days.” (The book doesn’t say outright, but it seems like we didn’t get on it early enough in this country. By the time we locked things down, it was too late and “The problem with implementing [social interventions] too late is you get all the downsides and little benefit, so speed is critical.”)

Another character in this story, Carter Mecher, offers an analogy: “Managing a pandemic was like driving a weird car that only accelerated, or braked, fifteen seconds after you hit the pedal. ‘Or think of looking at a star. It’s the same thing. The light you see is from years ago. When you are looking at a disease, the disease you are seeing is from last week.’”

COVID-19 has a couple of weird characteristics. One thing, for which we can be grateful, it is a disease that spreads quite easily, but it isn’t as dangerous as, say, Ebola. (Though certainly not without consequences for the nearly 600,000 who have died in this country and their grieving families.)

Another characteristic, most people didn’t pass the disease along. But there were “super-spreaders” who “played an outsized role in the spread of the disease.”

I’ll stop with the takeaways. I couldn’t put The Premonition down.

Q. Have you watched any good movies lately?

A. Actually, I have. I watched the movie, The Young Messiah, on Netflix.

Q. What’s it about?

A. It’s based on Anne Rice’s novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Both the book and the film are fiction, trying to imagine what it was like for Jesus as a child to come to understand who he was.

Q. What do you think about a made-up story about Jesus?

A. Well, I suppose you need to approach the subject cautiously. And this one does. The gospels are mostly about Jesus as an adult. They give us a brief look at Jesus as a baby and a very young child. But then there is no record of anything until he is twelve, attending Passover in Jerusalem. You can understand why someone would want to fill in the details.

Q. What did you like about the movie?

A. For starters, it’s a movie I can recommend without reservations. It’s short. I don’t have to warn anyone about language or tell them about a bad scene. It’s pretty well made.

Q. Anything you didn’t like?

A. I guess in general I don’t like movies about Jesus. The production quality is often low, which is disappointing. And then I don’t like the specificity of one particular actor trying to represent the Son of God. There are too many interpretive issues involved.

Q. What do you mean by interpretive issues?

A. Well, we tend to think of the gospels like a modern biography—where we’re given all sorts of information about a subject’s appearance—their height, weight, hair and skin color, personality, what they were wearing, etc. But the gospels don’t give us any of that sort of information.

And in the gospels we get the words of Jesus and not much more beyond that. We don’t get a lot of characterization—was he smiling when he said that? Did he sound angry? And so the actor that plays Jesus is making decisions in terms of the tone of Jesus that simply aren’t in the text. He is interpreting the text. I prefer having to use my imagination and to think deeply about the words—not see the representation of someone else’s imagination.

Q. So what was different about this movie that you don’t seem to have those objections?

A. This movie is dealing with a subject that has always interested me—what was it like for a young Jesus to come to terms with who he is? Obviously, he was human and didn’t arrive speaking complete sentences. But he was God, which means he had the power of God. And somehow he was an eternal being. Presumably he would not (or could not) sin. How did he relate to other people? The gospels don’t say anything about this. I don’t think it’s wrong to wonder or to try and fill in some of these details.

Q. Were there any surprises in the details?

A. Yeah, I think there were two. One was the presence of Satan in the life of the young Jesus. Satan isn’t always visible to the other characters in the story, but he does influence them. And so this brings a deeply spiritual emphasis to the film. It’s not creepy or spooky, as in a horror film, but we are made aware that there are spiritual realities that we tend to deny in our modern world. Jesus as an adult would be doing battle with evil. His presence in the world as a child was not unknown to dark powers. So I loved that this film represented a reality the Bible presents.

The second surprise was how dangerous the world was for Jesus and how much anxiety his parents felt. Obviously, the danger is represented in the gospel story. God appears to Joseph in a dream and warns him that he needs to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt. The threat is real and they live with an understandable level of pressure. They are living with both the normal anxieties of parenthood as well as this extra mission of keeping God alive until he is old enough to care for himself. It’s hard to imagine what that must have been like. Jesus was a little kid who needed protecting. God speaks to them and gives them a general instruction—”Go to Egypt”—but then all the details are on them. There’s so much of life that Joseph and Mary have to figure out. This, too, feels real.

Q. There’s the age-old question: the book or the movie? Which is better.

A. The book always wins. I’ve seen some enjoyable “based on the book” films, Sully, Remains of the Day, Pride and Prejudice, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the first Harry Potter. In this case, it’s been a long time since I read the Anne Rice book. My memory is that I really enjoyed it. Rice’s research was impeccable. She comes from a Catholic perspective, which has some traditions associated with the child, Jesus—but these so-called “infant narratives” aren’t historical accounts. For example, the scriptures tell us that the first miracle of Jesus was at Cana of Galilee, while the book (and the film) have Jesus performing miracles, although not consciously.

So maybe the fact that it’s been so long since I read the book made this film so much more enjoyable. Something I liked about both the book and the movie—while they are both fictional accounts, they are out to present a historical Jesus. I am behind any enterprise that tries to make the real Jesus known to the world.

Note: A version of the following appeared previously in an email I sent to my congregation this past summer.

Previously I wrote about the coronavirus.

It’s a difficult disease to manage because you’re contagious before you’re symptomatic, and you may never become symptomatic. As a disease it’s not a big deal, unless it’s a big deal, and then it can be a pretty big deal. To keep it from becoming a public health crisis, you need to act early, when it doesn’t look like a problem.

You can contain it when a small number of people have it, but if you don’t, then it becomes about mitigation, which is where we’ve been the last seven months, and may continue to be for some time. (In fairness, it did take medical professionals some time to realize that the coronavirus was being spread person-to-person.)

The coronavirus was a lot to deal with. And continues to be. Part of the story of this year is that we had a hard time finding common ground and holding on to the center. Somewhere we lost the spirit of “we’re all in this together.”

We have even felt this in the Church (not so much our congregation, but in the larger Church). There were some on one end of the spectrum who said (and continue to say) that they weren’t going to wear masks or maintain distance from others. Some have called this a “scamdemic” or a “plandemic,” suggesting conspiracies and/or no actual health problem. They maintain that the Church as well as the general economy should be business as usual. On the other end of the spectrum, there are churches that are effectively closed.

We have been trying a middle way. We want to obey the scriptures which remind us not to be “giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing” (Hebrews 10:25) and be part of the efforts to mitigate the disease—wearing masks and keeping our physical distance. To me this seems reasonable. We don’t want to live in fear. But we don’t want to be foolish, either. In the same way that you would sneeze into your elbow so as not to pass on your cold to people around you, it seems both loving and wise not to pass on the coronavirus, made more difficult because you will spread it before you have it, if you ever become aware that you had it.

This is not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t have opinions on the handling of this public health crisis. I’ve been pretty vocal in saying that we need better testing in this country. First of all, we need an easier and quicker test. (One of the members of my congregation had one of those early tests. He said something about the feeling of someone scratching his brain.) But a lot of problems would be solved if we had a way to test, even at home, and know if we are sick or have been sick.

And we need to trust our leadership. The most famous example is the prominent doctor and government spokesman who told us early on not to worry about masks. But now he says we should wear masks. His story was that he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough masks for medical professionals if everyone went out to buy them. So did he lie? What are we to make of his words now?

I’ll try to avoid a rant, here.

All this to say, we had plenty to deal with and we weren’t necessarily doing it that well.

And then George Floyd died in police custody on May 25, 2020. This absolutely should not have happened. Is it fair to say he was killed? I know it’s innocent until proven guilty, but we saw it with our own eyes. It was horrifying. I understand Floyd had some underlying health conditions, but isn’t it likely he would be alive today had that former police officer not knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, with three other police officers watching and bystanders asking, pleading, for him to stop?

Most people were disturbed by this. Many people were upset deeply by this, particularly members of the African-American community. Can you blame them? We had a conversation on one of our Wednesday night Zoom meetings with a Black pastor who was pretty outspoken about his feelings.

The death of George Floyd (as well as Breonna Taylor and others) was awful, but maybe there was some good that could come out of it. It looked like we could have a discussion about police procedures. (A friend of mine in law enforcement discovered that kneeling on someone’s neck is an actual police procedure in Minneapolis. It’s not here in Portland.) It looked like we could talk about police unions and removing the few bad police officers so that the vast majority of good ones could be trusted to do their jobs. It looked like we could have a discussion about racism in this country. It is, after all, America’s original sin.

I was certainly ready to go there.

But then something strange happened. The coronavirus was still a problem and family members could not be in the room with relatives as they died from the coronavirus, but large gatherings of protesters were allowed.

We decided—I use “we” because I really do believe we are all in this together—that the police were a greater health threat than the coronavirus.

And then protests turned into destruction and looting and rioting. We even, for a while, had an anarchist zone in Seattle. Reforming the police turned into defunding the police.

And here is where things get really difficult, because we don’t all see eye to eye on what has happened and what should happen, even in our little community. Some of us are overwhelmed by profound loss. Others see opportunities that need to be seized.

I see some good right now. These are personal reflections, but see if they ring true for you. Let me share three right now:

1. I believe this year is exposing some idolatry in our hearts. What do I mean? It’s just possible that for some of us love of country is more important than God right now. That, by definition, is idolatry. It’s one thing to be concerned about things you see and make them a matter of prayer. It’s another thing to be unsettled by the things you see and feeling as though all is lost because your vision of what America is and should be has become a kind of god to you. If God is the most important person in my life I won’t be troubled by anything else.

2. I believe this year is reminding us of sin and its effects. This is a fallen world—a good world gone wrong. A fallen world has disease and being a Christian does not always provide immunity from it. There are a number in our community struggling with bodies that aren’t working well right now. Broken bones. Heart trouble. The prospect of surgery. We have a friend who, recently, in the midst of all of these large-scale events this year, lost both parents in a ten-day period. If sin and death were the end of the story, it would be an unlivable tragedy we could never recover from. But we are promised both an abundant life in this world and eternal life in the one to come. That gives us hope. In the center of human sin and suffering is Jesus on the cross. Dying for our sin. Experiencing our suffering. Sin is not the whole story. It’s certainly not the end of the story.

3. I believe this year is reminding us of the importance of individuals. Presidents and governors are important. We need leaders who will lead us well. Can we agree that good leaders can make things better and bad leaders can make things worse? But the power and beauty of this country is not found in our leaders. It’s found in its citizens. The Constitution opens with “We the people …” The same is true of the church. The pastor and elders matter. They can make things better or worse. But nothing matters more than the individuals in the church. It’s what individuals do day in and day out that matters. I am so proud of this community that we get to be part of. I ran into town yesterday afternoon and there was a 94-year-old member of our community out with the weed-eater, keeping her lawn tidy. You’re doing what you know to do. And you’re making things better. I should say something about the importance of families, but I’m running late and long. I know there’s one family at the coast right now. There’s another one headed there this weekend. There’s another family that is camping. Another one went kayaking the other day when dad had a day off. These are triumphs. They won’t get reported on the news, but they matter so much right now.

Note: A version of the following appeared previously in an email I sent to my congregation this past summer.

How will you tell the story of this year? Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? Does your Christian faith influence how you tell the story? Here’s my first attempt:

We knew 2020 would have some drama to it. After all, it was an election year, but we had no idea what was coming. Early on there were some rumblings out of Wuhan, China about a new (“novel”) virus. It was called SARS-CoV-2 because of its similarity to the virus that caused SARS in 2003. [1] The disease it causes has been called Covid-19: “‘co’ for corona, ‘vi’ for virus, ‘d’ for disease, and ‘19’ for the year it appeared.” [2] It’s a little easier just to call it the coronavirus. At the end of January, travel from China was restricted to The United States because of it.

In the middle of February, Nancy and I traveled to California to work with some friends at a conference. At the event, we learned one of the speakers had cancelled. He was an older gentleman and his doctor told him not to travel because of the coronavirus. Then one of the support staff for the conference caught the flu and was banished to her hotel room. When I saw her a couple of days later, I remember feeling anxious about being near her. And then there was the flight home. I thought: “Is this a good idea?”

In March, we watched this novel coronavirus hit the country of Italy hard. The death toll was greater than in China and hospitals were overwhelmed. And then here in the States, as a country, as a state, as a church, we made changes to how we would live and move in the world. We wanted to flatten the curve. We refer to “lockdowns” in this country, but they were nothing like the lockdowns in China and Italy.

As a church, we stopped meeting, physically, but then someone had the idea of gathering online, which we began doing in April and have done ever since (with a few joyous experiments with drive-in church sprinkled in). As of July 5, we have begun a hybrid of meeting in our building, outside or in cars, and online on Sunday mornings at 11:00 am.

Normally, as Americans we have this ability to rally around each other. I remember when President Reagan was shot in 1981. I was a senior in my journalism classroom at San Pedro High School as we stood around the television. The report came out that Mr. Reagan had told the doctor, “I hope you’re a Republican.” The doctor responded, “Today, we’re all Republicans.”

9/11 was the same thing. We were all New Yorker’s. We were all especially aware of our own mortality and fragility and living accordingly.

Something was different with this coronavirus, though. We did hunker down. But then we hoarded. Toilet paper. Cleaning supplies. And then we got angry. Especially online. I suppose we were looking for someone to blame. But it’s hard to know who to blame.

I read a book on Covid-19 (Deborah MacKenzie, COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One. New York: Hachette Books, 2020.) and the author tells a story that is more complicated than this or that person/country is to blame. It’s probably better to say there’s plenty of blame to go around and the sources for our information share in some of it.

You wouldn’t think a disease like this would be political, but it is. And it has fractured our culture or at least has exposed the fractures.

The problems with this disease begin with the fact that you’re contagious before you’re symptomatic and you may not ever be symptomatic. And while the death rate is relatively low (somewhere between worse than the flu but not as bad as, say, SARS and MERS), it seems to affect different parts of our population differently—older Americans especially hard and young people hardly at all. The worse your economic situation right now, the worse your experience these last five months.

No one has a particularly good solution aside from a vaccine and we’re a ways away from that. Creating a vaccine is a complicated enterprise. It’s a race, but it’s not necessarily a race to be first. Everyone wants to be first, but the first vaccine may not be the best. And a bad vaccine will be worse than no vaccine. It will make the problem worse.

We have learned that an older person with the virus should not be put back into their retirement home. That seems clear. Physical distancing (which sounds a lot better than “social distancing”) and certain types of masks seem to help contain the spread. But the main thing is avoiding close-proximity to others in enclosed spaces over a period of time.

Anyway, this is what we thought this year would be about—dealing with the coronavirus. I mean, there were those murder hornets, [3] but that turned out to be nothing. At least for now. No, we were trying to figure out how to return to anything like normalcy. How do we plan? What is possible? What is safe? How do we balance economic concerns and human safety? There were and are a lot of questions. There’s a lot there to think through.

But then on May 25, George Floyd, a Black man, was killed while in police custody. Like most people, I thought this was horrific. It was wrong. And the arrogance on display in that image of the now former police office with his hands in his pockets while he snuffs out the life of Floyd is staggering.

Even a friend of mine in law enforcement told me this week that he and his colleagues have looked at the video and can’t make sense of the decision-making or the police procedures behind this person who knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. After all, there were four police officers there and the man was handcuffed. What could he do? This death shouldn’t have happened. But it did.

I thought, hoped, we would have an opportunity to discuss issues of race. It is, after all, America’s original sin.

To be continued . . .

_________________________

[1] Deborah MacKenzie, COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One. New York: Hachette Books, 2020, pp. ix and xxi.

[2] MacKenzie, p. ix.

[3] I mentioned “murder hornets” to a friend and she wrote back, “Please don’t call the Asian giant hornet a ‘murder hornet.’ That’s offensive!”

In The Power of Favor, each chapter has references to both Biblical and personal stories to illustrate lessons. If I’m correct, Moses is the 14th reference to a Biblical character as an example of favor. Osteen uses this story to illustrate the idea of “A Hedge of Protection” as this section of the chapter where I am picking up again is called. He refers to the plagues that God sent on the Egyptians and how they didn’t affect the Israelites. As the plague of flies is about to be introduced, Osteen has God speak to Pharaoh in this way,

“I will deal differently with the land where My people live. No swarms of flies will be there. I will make a distinction between you and My people.”

He continues to tell the story,

“Millions and millions of flies came into Pharaoh’s palace and all the houses of the Egyptians. The flies were so dense the people couldn’t see, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Their land was ruined by flies. But right next door, the Israelites had no flies. . . . It didn’t make sense in the natural. This was the hand of God putting a distinction on His people.”

And then there’s the application,

“God has put that same distinction on you. When He breathed life into you, He marked you for favor, marked you for blessing, marked you to stand out. What will defeat others won’t be able to defeat you.”

One of my ongoing questions about this book is Who is “you”? Who is marked for favor? Those who read this book? If so, what is it about reading this book that makes it so that a person is marked for favor? Is everyone who reads this book marked for favor? Is it possible to be marked for favor and not read this book? Other questions come from the statement, here, that the moment God “breathed life into you, He marked you for favor.” It sounds like favor is given to us at birth. Do I understand that correctly? Is it given to everyone? If favor is connected to salvation, does that happen at our first birth or does it require, as Jesus explained to Nicodemus, a second birth. Do “you”, whoever you are, have any responsibility related to that favor? Is there a way to reject it, for example?

Leaving behind this ongoing question of Who is “you”?, I’m struck by the juxtaposition of these words and the global Coronavirus pandemic that we are experiencing. We’re told that “What will defeat others won’t be able to defeat [us]”, but in our current circumstance there doesn’t appear to be a distinction between who gets and does not get the virus. And maybe this statement doesn’t apply to a global pandemic. To what does it apply, then? Is what Osteen is saying meaningful or meaningless? I don’t mean to be snide, but I am trying to understand the author’s claims.

To what extent do the promises of God create better and different realities in this world than they do for non-Christians? In other words, do we play by a different set of rules? Gravity seems to apply to everyone.

I watched pastors defy stay-at-home orders when the Coronavirus hit. On the one hand, I admired their faith: “No weapon formed against me will stand!” At the same time, it felt so foolish. Christians get colds, the flu, cancer, why was it that they wouldn’t get this disease? Either faith doesn’t work, or we are bringing the wrong expectations to our faith. I was curious what Osteen was saying about the virus and I found this press conference. When asked what encouragement he had for people, he said,

“I think it’s important to make that choice to not live from a place of fear, a place of worry, a place of panic. You know you draw in what you consistently think about and it’s easy—you know, you’re watching the news, and I’m not saying, you know, there’s not a lot of negative going on, but you have to make that choice, I’m going to live from a place of faith, a place of trust, a place of hope, not downplaying it, I want to be smart, I want to use wisdom, I’ll wash my hands, I’ll stay away from people, but I’m going to stay in a place of peace. I believe when you do that you draw in peace, you draw in faith, that helps you to make it through.”

This seems absolutely reasonable. Have faith. Don’t be foolish. What it doesn’t say is that Christians aren’t any different than anyone else. The measured tone is markedly different from the claims of the book. When asked about parents with kids at home, Osteen remarked,

“I believe God will give you grace for every season and this is not a surprise to him, so I think that as parents if we can stay in peace, if we can be the example, that we’re not panicked, that we’re not upset, I think it translates down to our children and again I think we have to take it one day at a time. God gives us grace for today. You think about Can I do this for a month? Can I do this for a year? I don’t know, but if you come back to Can I can get through 24 hours?—“God, give me your grace for today,” I believe that is going to help you make it through each and every day. Not looking at the long term but looking at today.”

There was a check for understanding from the reporter, and Osteen continued,

“You can use your energy to worry or you can use your energy to believe. It takes the same amount of energy to worry or to say, ‘Okay, God I know you’ve got me in the palm of your hand. I know you’re guiding me, that you’re protecting me, that you’re helping those who need your help.’ And so you just use that energy to stay positive, to stay grateful. Yes, it’s difficult. Some of us can’t go to work, but you know it’s time that we can spend with our family, that we can make the most of that. I even have a friend of mine that’s doing a little bit … learning more of a new career, improving his career, because he has the time off, so I think we have to see the good in it and stay in faith and pray for those that have contracted the virus, but let’s stay in faith and believe that good will come out of it and I know like it always happens we’ll come out of it better than we were before.”

This strikes me also as a good response. The essence of the Christian faith is that while we’re not immune from the emotions we all feel from the things going on around us, we’re not undone by them because we have inner resources given to us by God. This is the only way I can explain, for example, the lack of pain mentioned in the letters of Paul. He describes these awful things that happen to him but he always speaks of the joy he feels in the midst of trying circumstances. It’s both inspiring and convicting.

These are tough times. And there are questions that aren’t easy to answer. For me as a pastor, what do I say to my congregation? I’ve seen a number of approaches:
1. Continue on in ignorance of science. I think this has been largely seen as foolish. Well, and it’s illegal right now, although that appears to be changing.

2. Continue on in small groups. I’ve noticed some churches that are very small simply continuing to meet.

3. Cooperate simply by stopping meeting.

4. Cooperate and innovate. Figure out new ways to do and be the church.

It appears that Osteen has taken the last path. Honestly, I don’t envy larger churches right now. There is such a potential for disaster if they re-open.

To return to the book, after assuring his readers that we “don’t have to live worried … even though there are so many negative things in the world, so much crime and violence. It may be happening all around you, but you have an advantage. God has put a distinction on you,” Osteen hedges his bets a little bit:

“I’m not saying negative things will never happen. That’s not reality. I’m saying you are protected by the One who controls it all. If God allows it to happen, He’s promised that He will turn it somehow and use it for your good.”

I can’t tell if he is being contradictory, here, or finally acknowledging that the blessing of God is not a straightforward path of everything getting better and better. Where I think he wants to go is to say that God has good in mind for you. That good may include material blessings and protection from bad things. If not, don’t worry, because God still has good things ultimately. I feel like the difference is between “good things are coming your way” and “Trust in God’s goodness.” The former is a promise that not even God makes. Or perhaps he is saying that everything that happens is an example of God’s favor. Why pray, then, for example God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven? It really is challenging to reconcile all of this.

Osteen picks up the Moses story noting that Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Israelites go even after the plague of flies. He says that the rest of the plagues only applied to the Egyptians. Even if they tried to get away from the flies (and frogs and locusts), “everywhere they went, the plagues followed them.” As far as the Israelites, “It wasn’t where the Israelites were that kept them from the plagues. It was what was on them—the distinction, the favor, the blessing that comes from being a child of the Most High God.”

I wish Osteen would address this point that while the Israelites have the favor of God, the Egyptians most decidely do not. If there is a point of application for us today from the story of the Israelites in terms of favor, isn’t there a point of application that could be made about disfavor in the story of the Egyptians.

Also, this would be a good place to establish how one becomes “a child of the Most High God.” What if this was the first of his books that Osteen’s reader picked up? It is in my case. It feels like there are things assumed that are never explained. Rather than take the time,  Osteen simply moves on to make an application for his readers, who he tells,

“You and I have that same blessing. We may have things around us that could harm us, keep us from our dreams, bring us down. Stay in faith. There is a distinction on your life, on your property, on your children, on your career, and on your health that is put there by the Creator of the universe.”

Is this the message he would have written had he known the Coronavirus was coming? Maybe not a fair point on my part. But there certainly are plenty of assurances about the future and one wonders what Osteen would have said had he known about the coming crisis. At the very least, measured tones would be in order, although there are some preachers who are not measured at all about anything.

Next, Osteen tells an incredible story about an orange farmer who heard a freeze was coming and walked around his property “thanking [God] that [his oranges] wouldn’t freeze and that he would have a harvest that year.” Osteen says the other farmers thought this man was “so strange” and “[t]hey made fun and ridiculed him.” We can see where this is heading. This man’s orange grove was saved while the orange groves around him died. Osteen anticipates objections of those who might think this man had a lucky break, but he says “that was the hand of God putting a distinction on his property.” I have no problem with the miracle. I take that at face value. There are Christians who experience tragedy, though. It’s hard to reconcile it all. How do we rejoice at the one thing and help people know what they can expect from God.

Osteen says, “The economy doesn’t determine if you’re blessed: God does.” He goes on to talk about someone who was having a great year in sales even in a bad economy. We get something of a condition, here. Osteen writes,

“Here’s the key: As long as you stay close to God, as long as you keep Him first place, you are connected to a supply chain that will never run dry.”

Wouldn’t it be good to have that notion of staying close to God explained? Osteen talks about how his father raised an enormous sum of money to build a building in tough economic times after having open-heart surgery. And then we’re back to Joseph. This jumping from Bible story to Bible story gives me a bit of whiplash. Joseph made an appearance in the first chapter. Here he is back again. Two pages later it’s Abraham.

One of the things that needs to be explained is how can we make this promise of favor to the general masses when one of the things in Scripture is the way God seems to single out individuals to put his favor on. Abraham received favor that no one else did. The point that Osteen makes, though, is that favor will spill out onto those around us, so that favor may not be on everyone, but if it’s on us, it will get on others.

Chapter 4 ends with another story of someone in his congregation for who great things happened. I rejoice for them. It’s not that I don’t believe the story. It’s that the world is more complicated than the story we are being told. We need stories to illustrate the points we want to make, but the stories would easier to accept if I felt like they were illustrating points I understood or agreed with.