Day 199: A Nation's Anguish

 DAY 199

Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic

A series of daily reflections for people of faith

by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor

Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland

pastorrobert@paxpres.org

Week Twenty-nine    Tuesday 29 September 2020

A Nation’s Anguish

As Deaths Reach 200,000

“It is a staggering toll, 200,000 people dead from the coronavirus in the United States, and nearly five times that many  - close to one million people – around the world…The coronavirus death toll in the United States is now roughly equal to the population of Akron, Ohio, or nearly two and a half times the number of service members who died in battle in the Vietnam and Korean wars combined, and about 800 people are still dying daily….Shane Peoples, 41, has had plenty of grief since his parents were taken by the coronavirus this month. It has frequently been interrupted by outrage. He tells their story like the storybook romance it was: Darlene and Johnny Peoples, native North Carolinians, were happily married for nearly half a century, and were exceptionally close and devoted to their children. But that lifetime together ended abruptly when the couple, both of them stricken by the coronavirus, died four minutes apart while holding hands in a hospital room in Salisbury, N.C. They went to the hospital on the same day. They entered the intensive care unit on the same day. And they died on the same day. ‘They held each other’s hands for 50 years,‘ Mr. Peoples said. ‘They held them as they left this earth and they are holding them in heaven.’” - From a current major newspaper article by the same title.

Reading the story about just two of the over 200,000 who have died thus far gives us a glimpse, a window, into the grief being experienced across the country, a grief compounded by being barred from being at the bedside to give a final kiss and say good-by, a grief compounded by the absence of traditional funerals followed by receptions with lots of hugs, a grief compounded by anger at the politicizing of what should be a national unified effort to deal with the virus and an absence of a national unified expression of mourning in the light of those we’ve lost. The absence of such unified national efforts and expressions compounds anger and accentuates but does not assuage grief. We live in a difficult time, a time, as the newspaper article headlines, of ‘anguish.’

To all who mourn Jesus offers comfort and to all who are angry Jesus offers peace.

Reflective question: Will you pray today for someone you know who has lost a loved one from whatever cause?

Reflective Scripture: Matthew 5:4 –“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Reflective hymn:

“O God, Our Help in Ages Past” - Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our lives away,

They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.