Cerveny: Coronavirus crisis – why being out of control is a gift

Our family went to the beach in South Florida last month. The first morning there I took my 5-year-old daughter into the ocean and pulled her past the breakers on a cheap plastic raft.

Once we were in the calmer water she grinned and pushed away from me, testing the boundaries of her control. It was a game that brought her a tremendous amount of joy; that is, until a fish flipped or a large boat sent a wake big enough to wash her illusions of control out to sea. She would then scramble like a cat in a bathtub to jump onto my arms as we both belly laughed.

Toward the end of our trip, my wife and I woke to hear the coronavirus had reached pandemic proportions. I sat on our porch that afternoon and found myself thinking about my daughter and the game we played in the ocean. Her floating confidently in water too deep for her to stand was like a performance art piece for my own spiritual life.

It is so easy to become giddy with the illusion that things are in my control. I can blindly trust the thin plastic rafts of my health, ministry life, abilities and religious busyness. But as I watched infection statistics and line graphs rise like waves, all those things seemed so anemic. There was something much more powerful and untamed coming my way; something beyond my control.

Our current situation — barring a supernatural gift for denial — brings things into sharp focus. It not only reveals how flimsy the rafts upon which we tend to build our lives actually are, but how helpless we become when the air goes out of them.

If we dare to be honest, the pandemic isn’t stripping us of control. It is showing us how little control we have always had. It also reveals the God-given cry of every human heart: What is bigger than me and more powerful than me that will take care of this?

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https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/coronavirus-crisis-sunday-message-billy-cerveny