This week has been unusual to say the least! Atticus and I have been home isolating, thanks to my at-home positive test result and him being too young to be vaccinated, and the week has been a combination of work-from-home and sick leave as Katy and I work to balance it all. I am so very fortunate to have Katy working from home now, and to have sick time and flexibility with my ministry at St. Michael’s, that together we can make it all mostly work out without severe interruptions. I am also very grateful that my own symptoms have been minor, not ever getting worse than a severe sinus infection and seeming to now be improving. For so many right now, they do not have the advantages that I have. I look around and I see a lot of suffering, and even in my comfortable life at times struggle with the ups and downs of the pandemic, family life, and work balance. Who doesn’t? How do Christians respond to the suffering internally and externally? Where do we say God is in all of this?

     On Tuesday at our weekly staff meeting, the staff and I often pray together and share the devotional from Forward Movement in its podcast form. Listen to the one from Tuesday, January 11, here: https://www.forwardmovement.org/Pages/Item/12306/Podcast.aspx . In it, the speaker asked us to consider God’s work in the midst of our suffering. Sometimes, God can use our suffering and difficulties to teach us lessons we need to learn. While not always the case, sometimes God can even use these hard times to help us grow closer to God and our neighbor. Suffering is not always a wasted or pointless experience. And even while we are in the midst of them, not sure of what good could possibly come out of it, God is there with the abiding presence and love for us. Through all suffering, through all “valleys of the shadow of death,” God is walking with us.

      Not too long ago, I was preaching a funeral sermon, and I mentioned a Meme I had recently seen: in it, the words “God does not give us more than we can handle” were crossed out, and instead written above them were the words, “God goes with us through the unimaginable.” So my thought for us this week, as we see the new surge and grapple with private struggles that may not be visible to anyone else, God sees, and God is there loving us. And from this God may bring fruits that we cannot see or imagine yet. Where is God in your life right now? When was the last time you stopped to take a minute to breathe in God’s abiding presence in the midst of hardship or even in the midst of your joy? When we seek God, God can be found.

See you in church (with a mask of course),

Jesse+