12:57

12:57 PM on Wednesday will mark four weeks since Sara set foot inside her grădiniță (preschool). That is a long time for a three-year-old. That is a long time for anybody. It is especially hard to look into her eyes and mutter truthfully, “No, I don’t know when you will go back to school.”



No doubt this experience is the same the world over. People use various terms to describe this period: strange, difficult, crisis, etc. So many unknowns. Certainty in uncertainty is a global reality. Red, yellow, black, and white.



Speaking from a spiritual standpoint, we’ve always known that life is fragile and fleeting and only God and his word never pass away. Like grass and flowers withering and falling, mankind lives grandly and dies. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.



Yet woe to the preacher who does not step down from the spiritual standpoint and enter the material realm. Fear and sickness and suffering and death should not be glossed over in the name of spirituality. God forbid.



So, we tell our daughter the truth. “There are sick people out there, Sara, and people we trust have told us to stay home.” Surprisingly, she gets it. As hard as it is, she gets it. “Daddy, let’s pray for the sick kids and sick grown-ups.” Indeed. Why didn’t I think of that?



Once there was a wise Romanian Baptist pastor whose prayers, it is said, launched a revival even in the height of Communism. In 1974, Liviu Olah wrote, “I’m convinced that what nuclear energy is to the material world, prayer is to the spiritual world.” I wonder if, for our day, “nuclear energy” may be substituted with “pandemic”?


The time has come when COVID-19 is not some distant disease in China. Many of us now know people personally battling the Coronavirus. As Sara and Liviu Olah have prompted me in recent days, let us pray. As our kids stare searchingly into our eyes, trusting that we know what to do, let us pray. As Johns Hopkins University reports climbing statistics toward a possible “peak,” let us pray. And, Lord willing, after this season passes, we will all be better for having disciplined ourselves to pray.