About a month ago I wrote a post on here titled, “Amid the mess“.
In it I discussed the struggles of navigating social media, especially Instagram. I had taken a long break from the platform last Fall, hoping to gain some insight as to how to approach it and use it in a way that honored the Lord and honestly was just better for my mental health.
I didn’t really gain the insight I wanted.
So, in February, I decided to come back full force by not only re-downloading the app, but challenging myself to post daily. I thought that by doing this, I would share more real and relatable content since not every day really includes an “instagram-worthy” moment.
The challenge was going pretty good. For a while.
Then March hit. Or should I say, coronavirus hit.
As someone who tends to distance themselves when troubling or confusing circumstances are taking place, posting on instagram was the last thing I wanted to do when life as I knew it was changing.
It felt forced.
So I stopped. I failed my own challenge. But I’m sure you understand.
I’m sure you’ve had plans that have fell through during this season. I’m sure you have had to make sacrifices and adjust not only your schedules but your heart and your attitude as well.
(I’m still adjusting those)
I wasn’t planning for coronavirus. And I didn’t expect life to change so much because of it.
Truly, this has been the season of the unexpected.
And just as expectations range from high to low, to reasonable and unreasonable, good and bad, so have I been tossing and turning in the waves of emotion that COVID-19 has caused.
I wish I could say I stopped my instagram challenge because I simply got too busy, but the truth is, I simply got too weary. When I began the challenge a month ago, I didn’t expect that a global pandemic would come interrupt life as we knew it.
Last Sunday however, my first Easter Sunday that I didn’t attend church in an Easter dress, my pastor shared a beautiful truth.
Easter was unexpected too.
The Messiah that came to heal the sick and eat with the sinners was not the Messiah that the Jews expected. They wanted a King, but God sent them a Savior. They wanted the lion of Judah, but God knew first, they needed the lamb.
And no one expected the lamb to die. No one expected such extravagant love from God. No one understood it. Then they thought that the cross had conquered Christ, not knowing Christ on the cross was conquering our sin, conquering our failures, conquering death itself.
No one expected him to rise again.
As the downcast disciples walking to Emmaus expressed, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” -Luke 24:21
We had hoped. Those words feel familiar.
I hoped too, for many things in 2020 that realistically, will no longer come to pass. I’m sure you did too. Coronavirus blind-sighted us all.
And yet, God still works in the unexpected.
Jesus didn’t meet the Jews expectations, because his plans and his purposes far outweighed their own. And Jesus didn’t stay dead, like Pilate, and Caiaphas, and Peter and James, and the laws of nature itself expected.
As 1 Corinthians 1:18 says, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are being destroyed. But it is the power of God for those of us who are being saved.”
The cross may have been unexpected, even complete foolishness to those who didn’t understand it, but it was exactly what we needed.
And if God worked back then, in equally mysterious and miraculous ways, he can work in this season of coronavirus too.
When Corrie Ten Boom was a little girl, she remembered praying these words: ““Lord Jesus, I offer myself to you. In any way. Any place. Any time.” I’m sure as she prayed those words, she had expectations of how they’d be fulfilled. I’m sure she didn’t foresee hiding jews in her home, then being sent to a concentration camp, then losing her beloved sister, and suffering from hunger and cold and humiliation and fear. Yet it is through those painful, unexpected circumstances that God answered her prayer to be used by Him.
God is still answering prayers in our time too, amid this global pandemic we’re in. We can still be used by him. And He can still fulfill his purposes through us.
As Ephesians 3:20 says, ” He is able to do immeasurably more than all we could ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”
Thank God that our Lord has never been in the practice of meeting our expectations. His purposes dwarf our dreams. His plans make a fool of our own. His ways are higher, and BETTER, than our ways.
And He is still the God of the unexpected.
