Peaceful Discipleship
by Lisa Coleman
Do you like to watch movies about natural disasters? I have a cousin who loves books that give accounts of famous hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, mudslides, shipwrecks, and plagues. And as if there wasn’t enough carnage in our history, fiction writers have cashed in on all sorts of disaster tales for our insatiable fascination with doom.
Stressed out by the overwhelming events caused by the coronavirus in her city, New York City resident Gabrielle Bellot has a thirst for reassurance that everything will turn out all right.
She writes, that literature on pandemics, such as The Plague by Albert Camus, is never mainly about the disease: Instead, it examines how humans deal with disease, how our inner lives shift as our outer worlds do. It affirms how precarious our place on this planet is. We move, unceasingly, in a dance with Lady Death. Her … perfume of necropolis grass and old flowers always near. If our life is always a dance macabre, the question is simply when she will take our hand in hers, blue and black nails against our skin, and bring us … into the sunless place beyond our life’s ballroom. Death, plague literature reminds us, is always, always with us.
We are living in a world “that seems to hang on the edge of apocalypse, climate or virus-related” tragedies. She doesn’t know what lies ahead, but “plagues, after all, will always return, whether or not we are ready. I still don’t know if I am. … The literature of disease reveals the ghostly ballet we live in, ever so close to the grave. But it shows, too, those surprising moments of joy, love, and beauty we can find during disasters, even just briefly.” Preaching Today
The thing that stands out about her musings is the absence of God. Death is always with us? Holy Scripture declares Immanuel – God with us. It is true that we will have times of great trials. Men offer medicine, philosophy, and technology to mend our sufferings, yet we find assurance, peace, and security – true peace of mind, in our relationship with our God.
Paul had that kind of peace during his own chaos as we shall see this week in Acts 27. Please join us for the discussion and to find out the next study we will be starting October 24th!
* * * * *
You can download the Bible study materials for this session for your personal use and watch the Zoom video of the in-class session by following the links below:
PowerPoint Slides
PDF File
Video
Follow this link to find other studies in the INpowered Discipleship series.
