Now that it appears clear the pandemic isn’t going anywhere for a good while, and with it the occasional/constant lockdowns, we need to help people move from expectations to “return to normal” to encouraging patience and endurance through suffering and sacrifice…

1/

As natural as it is to want life to return to comforts we may have once had, it does no good to encourage people to pursue their desires for freedom and normalcy.

2/

Instead, we need to call people to the virtues of sacrifice, loving your neighbor, and serving not your own interests but the community’s communal interests. It’s not about you, we must tell people, but it’s about all of us.

3/

If you’re a follower of Jesus, the Scriptures have amazing resources for such calls:

“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…”

- Romans 5:3-5

4/

Or

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

- Philippians 2:3-4

5/

And of course, our main resource for this will be Jesus Himself, who,

“though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant…

- Philippians 2:6-8

6/

Jesus is our ultimate example of the One who long-suffered for others, who laid down His own self-interests for those not just of His own community, but those of the whole world. Jesus will need to be our example how to have patience through the sacrifices of this pandemic.

/End