Has something shifted lately? Is there something different in the air?

As the pressure mounts to get “back to normal,” we have both the luxury and the challenge of asking “what do we want our new normal to look like?” but more importantly, “what kind of new normal is God leading us into?”

Just when we’ve given up hope, we’ll look back and see that things are already better.

Many of us are still “coming up for air” from the suffocating isolation of a year mostly apart. But aside from conforming to on-going public health measures, the challenges before us aren’t terribly new--and neither are the opportunities! God is still at work in and among and through us, and sometimes even around us, to make Christ’s love known in Tulsa and beyond.

The point of spiritual disciplines, of course, is not to try to score spiritual “bonus points.” That will always and everywhere eventually lead to a dead end. The point is always to lead us back to the one true source of all genuine trust, hope and love.

These past nine months have shown each of us more clearly what we need and what we hunger for, what we have plenty of and what we have too little of. Indeed the key to doing difficult things well is to know that it is Christ who strengthens us: not to do anything and everything, but to discover that for which we are most gifted, and is most necessary for others, and to do it well.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of us to be of one mind on these things. But it is God’s heartbeat that underlies our own, God’s Spirit that brings us together (sometimes literally and these days, often virtually), and Christ’s obedience that inspires our own.

Looking forward to the rest of the year at Joy Lutheran Church.

Here we are together, apart, caught in the messy middle between the fear & uncertainty of two months ago, and the hoped-for end of a global pandemic. The pandemic seems further away from us individually than it has in a long time, but the end of the pandemic overall seems further away than ever. The novel coronavirus is still spreading in many communities, including metro Tulsa, but it feels like many folks are trying to go back to the way things used to be.

We’re about six weeks into our lives being turned upside down, and although Oklahoma is trying to get back to normal, I don’t see that in the cards for us. Too many in our church community are too vulnerable to the still-spreading coronavirus, and it may be spreading as much as ever here in Tulsa. Lifting restrictions now, while an understandable concession to the social, economic and mental health effects of lockdown, will almost certainly increase its spread even further.