2020 and The Spirit of Fear by Janet Hill

I think we can agree that 2020 has been a year of fear and anxiety. My year began with excitement and fun. In late February, we had our first trip to Disney with two of my grandchildren planned. Their excitement, and ours, was all that we hoped it would be. But as the week ended, and the kids came back to Kansas City, the waters began to stir.

We planned to spend another week in Florida, just Jerry and me, relaxing. But on the afternoon the kids left, Jerry got a call that a young (late 40’s) co-worker and friend had died in a tragic skiing accident. We stayed in Florida, as planned, but instead of relaxing the week away, it was spent in phone meetings and emails trying to solve the problems that Brent’s loss would cause in Jerry’s work. As our week ended, another wave of anxiety began to show its face.

The Coronavirus, which had begun in Wuhan China, had made its way to the United States and, yes, to Florida. We came home to discussions of lockdowns, fears of not enough PPE in our hospitals, and concern that we could not manage the illness or the deaths. We didn’t see our granddaughters again until the first weekend in June.

We are still living with waves and changes of the fear and anxiety of the pandemic this virus has wreaked on our lives. I am fortunate that no one in my immediate family has been struck ill with this disease. But I worry about the economic impact on my children, especially my 24-year-old and her significant other, who are young in their careers and have not experienced recession, let alone depression.  2020 was not done creating havoc.

In March, my sister-in-law found my 44-year-old nephew dead in his bed. The coroner wouldn’t do an autopsy because of the virus. Still, other tests indicated it was probably an aneurysm or heart attack that took this full of love and humor family member away too soon. We haven’t yet had the funeral, once again, because of the virus. We’ve had to love and care for one another from afar.

One of my responsibilities at work is to notify the church family when one of our members loses a loved one as we did in March. At the time of this writing, I have sent out twenty-two announcements, since March 1, on behalf of church families who haven’t been able to be surrounded by the love and support of friends and family in traditional ways. No church funerals for those families, at least not yet. The wave of grief is not as readily seen as the other disasters of 2020, but it is there, nonetheless. Twenty-two is an astounding number. None of these have been virus-related deaths. In a typical quarter, I send six to eight announcements to the congregation. The grief has to be palpable among our 2BC family.

The addition of more anxiety and fear was still coming our way. On February 23, Ahmaud Arbery was shot while jogging in his own neighborhood. This horrible act of racial injustice was awful, and as we all know, was quickly followed by a police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, after he had been detained and handcuffed, for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Breonna Taylor was shot eight times while sleeping in her bed in Louisville, KY. These visible examples of systemic racial injustice in our country, couldn’t be tolerated by most of the United States and much of the world. We exploded into protests and arguments not only in the public eye but with our closest friends and family members. Not everyone agreed about what they were witnessing and why. So, opinions began flying off the pages we read and news we saw. It seemed no one was silent. The tsunami of 2020 had brought another wave of grief and fear.

Fear is a pervasive feeling in society right now. The pandemic has rained down fear on us and crashed into us in waves of emotions. It is the perfect storm. We can’t be with loved ones when we need them. We fear for our health and the health of others. We fear death from an unknown virus that we can’t even see. We fear our country doesn’t know how to heal and treat one another with kindness and love. The anxiety of unemployment and changed society makes us want to hide in our beds, immobile, afraid of tomorrow.

But “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7). There is hope in that promise. There is hope for even the darkest of circumstances. Resurrection rings in the ear when Paul, from prison, tells Timothy that God has given us a spirit of power. The same power that raised Christ is the spirit that breathes love and self-discipline into our hearts today. Change is difficult. But we must change to grow. We must harness the fear that 2020 has stirred to the surface. We need to face one another with love. And we need to bring about broad, cultural, and systemic change. It begins with me. It begins with you. We must dig deep and find a way to trust God, use the power and self-discipline we have been given, and make the necessary changes. Pray with me that we are able.