Unprecendented

This week’s adventure: Toxic air. Hazardous levels the EPA has no idea how it will affect all the people breathing it in. It’s just the latest thing to add to the list of unprecedented situations we’ve encountered this year.

I heard my pastor describe this year as an epoch of crisis. One crisis after another – pandemic, economic uncertainty, protests and riots, political unrest, wildfires and evacuations, toxic smoke. It seems like an apt description. And with each new crisis comes yet another commentator describing the unprecedented circumstances that we’re facing.

Unprecedented. There’s something bound up in that word. It hits a place of anxiety, the uneasiness of facing something that doesn’t have a structured plan to navigate it. It’s the language we use when we don’t how to handle things. When it doesn’t feel like anyone has gone before you. When you feel like your circumstances have flown off the pages of the rule book and it’s a free for all figuring out what to do next. How many things have felt that way this year?

I hit a turning point earlier in the year somewhere in the middle of crisis #2. Maybe after the second or third round of unprecedented circumstances that were rocking my world. I sat and talked with a friend and found myself saying words to her that my own soul wasn’t even sure were true. “You know, as crazy as this world is, nothing’s really changed.” Naturally, she laughed at me because so many things have changed.

When sin entered the world like a cancer wasn’t the precedent established?

Is chaos really unprecedented?

And while there are many circumstances that feel new and foreign, the precedents we live by as Christians haven’t changed at all. We’re not standing in situations that no one has gone before us in because we have a Savior who has gone before us in everything. We’re not standing in something that is new and chaotic but we know that the chaos around us is the chaos sin brought into this world. When Eve ate the apple and shared it with her husband the precedent for these circumstances was born. A perfect world wrought with sin. A cancerous distortion of everything good.

I love the imagery in Psalm 46. We will not fear though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea. Though the waves crash around it. It’s a description of the safest and most secure things being thrown into the scariest and out of control place. In Hebrew poetry the mountains are a place of safety and the waters are the place of danger. The sea is uncontrollable and chaotic but the mountains are sturdy and safe. So in this picture not only is your safe place plunged into danger but the chaos is roaring around it.

I’ve felt this way this year. Things I never would have even identified as safe places were shaken. Things I didn’t even know I rested on for security until they were gone. Predictability, the stability of our nation, regular routines and rhythms.

Things were shaken and thrown into the heart of the sea, but it wasn’t until I was completely unnerved by it that I began to realize how much safety I had found in them.

How many things this year fit into that imagery?

There’s a security in predictability. In normalcy. In plans.

As my mountains were moved into the heart of the sea, as I sat feeling the waves roar around them, the reality that the world hasn’t changed settled in. Yes, a lot of things are rearranged, many things feel foreign, but the chaos I feel now is the same chaos that sin ripped into creation the moment Adam and Eve at the fruit. From that moment on the hearts of men were evil, motives were perverted, creation rebels and longs for redemption. Viruses appeared. And people began to fight. And violence became a means to get your own will. Nations raged, kingdom toppled. Disasters – hurricanes and tornados, earthquakes and forest fires, these became the norm. I’ve come to realize more poignantly how we live in a world that feels equipped to subdue the effects of sin. So much so that I’m tempted to lean on those structures for true safety. Tempted, perhaps, to believe that the CDC is able to help me number my own days. That the Hot Shot teams that come to help fight forest fires and the Incident Management teams are what protect me in my home. That the stability of a nation is what makes my world secure.

But when I can see past those temptations and learn to look through the grid my kind Heavenly Father provides me, I can see that those things are my mountains. And like the words of Psalm 121, when I’m tempted to look to the mountains for my help, I must remind myself that my help comes from the Lord. Danger is the precedented situation and the plan is now, and always has been, for the Lord to be my ever present, consistently faithful help in that situation.

In the midst of this chaos sits a city, the people of God, unmoved because he dwells with her. He provides her streams of living water.