Your role in a world gone crazy

A year ago, when 2020 was still a baby and a virus in China only a vague, faraway story, Hubby and I listened to a podcast from Ransomed Heart Ministries called “The River of Life.” I half-listened while I pieced together a quilt made from old blue jeans, thinking more about gifting my kids with these quilts than on what John Eldredge and his partners were saying.

They spoke about something God had revealed to them during prayer: how a spirit of death was sweeping across the earth. A literal, high-ranking dark spirit who would bring not only physical death, but the end of relationships, projects, businesses, ministries. This spirit would try to convince us we no longer care about our lifelong dreams and goals. That it is time for them to end. That certain friendships—even marriages—can go.

Their conversation sounded a bit mumbo-jumbo, even for a believer like me.

But not anymore.

In a normal year, I might attend one or two funerals. Some years, none. Looking back on 2020, I can easily think of four funerals I would have attended, had we been allowed to hold them. None were from Covid-19. Though the pandemic has not (so far) personally affected my life much more than an inconvenience, we don’t need to look far to see how accurate the podcast was. Lives lost. Economies ruined. Hope destroyed. Hatred, fear, and anger abounding.

The good news, according to these Ransomed Heart guys, is that we are not helpless. Though this spirit is strong, God is stronger. The solution lies in praying the river of life (written about in Ezekiel 47) as a shield all around us. “As you pray this prayer,” Eldredge says, “You will realize the number of areas where this spirit of death has been operating. As you begin to invoke life, the spirit of death backs off.”

Whether you believe this or not, whether you choose to put it into practice or not, you can’t deny we live in tough times—relatively speaking. I say relative, because this planet has known tougher times in the past and will experience tougher times in the future. If you study your Bible, you know that. I can’t guarantee that five years from now, we won’t be saying, “Remember when we thought 2020 was so hard?”

But I can tell you this. No pandemic, no war, no economic or environmental crisis is ever the main story. Pandemics come and go. Wars begin and end. Leaders rise and fall. For a while, they are the biggest story in the news or in the coffee shops or on social media. They inspire creative conspiracy theories, driving wedges between former friends and striking fear into hearts. These events may hold the largest microphone, but they are never the main story.

That title belongs to God. The story of Jesus Christ has always been and always will be THE STORY.
Everything else is periphery. He runs everything from governments to galaxies, and he commands the final word on it all.

A vaccine for Covid-19 brings hope, and that’s good. I will probably get one when my turn comes. But if my turn doesn’t come, I’m okay with that, too. Because my hope does not lie in a vaccine. With or without one, the death rate for humans is still 100%.

My hope lies in the one who will always be the main story.

Because of this truth, it’s possible for you and me to live productive lives, free from fear. Don’t let the enemy of us all convince you there is nothing you can do. When you pray, invoke God’s river of life over your own small kingdom so that it overflows its banks onto your surrounding community. This is how you play your role in the main story.

TV or Not TV?

We had been married 18 months and had gotten along fine without television when I had an overnight stay in the hospital where I made friends with my roommate. Somehow the topic of televisions came up and she offered us an old set she and her husband no longer used. “It just needs a few tubes replaced,” she said. (Yes, I’m that old.)

We drove to the town where she lived and lugged the monstrosity home. Hubby dutifully removed the back, tested all the tubes, and sorted out which ones needed replacing. I can’t remember what we paid for them, but you can bet it was more than we could afford with my McWages and his college tuition. We did it anyway. And we had ourselves a TV! 

Shortly after it quit, my boss offered us a little set a renter had left behind in his storage units. The big TV now served as a stand for the little one. Reception was lousy. When we moved back to Manitoba, we left both TVs behind.

A few years later, my sister and brother-in-law gifted us with another small black and white set after upgrading themselves. By this time we had two kids who gladly watched Mr. Dressup and Fred Penner. My reward at 10 pm after the kids were in bed was to sit down to reruns of M*A*S*H.

One day I was trying to watch the news while working in my kitchen. I set the TV on a stacking stool and the silly thing decided to commit suicide right then and there, pitching itself forward and landing on its face on the floor with a crack.

By this time, we’d been married fifteen years and had yet to actually purchase a TV. 

We went a few years without one, and then my grandmother moved into a nursing home. When her kids bought her a new TV to take with her, we inherited her old one—maybe because no one else wanted it. Through their high school years, our kids got teased by their friends about their state-of-the-art TV and the channel selection nob that went kachunk-kachunk as you cranked it around by hand.

When we moved to town, we no longer had an antenna and refused to pay for cable or satellite, but we could usually get one channel with the rabbit ears. When Granny passed away in 2002, we inherited her “new” TV. Finally, we had joined the 1990s!

We hooked the TV up to a DVD player and used it for movies only. At some point, hubby and some of his guy friends began meeting in our home for a weekly Wild at Heart book/video study. One friend brought his own larger TV with him, declaring ours too small for real men to enjoy. When the study was over, he told us to keep the TV since he’d recently bought a flat screen and this one took up too much space.

Fine by us. We had now been married 35 years and had yet to purchase a TV.

Then our daughter and son-in-law offered us a small flat-screen that had been left behind by the previous owners of their new house. You bet we’d take it! After hauling it home from Calgary and donating the big one to Habitat, we discovered the quirky flat screen had a tendency to overheat and shut itself off after 30 or 40 minutes of viewing. For a year, any movie we watched lasted us all week as we viewed it in half hour segments.

This past October marked our 38th wedding anniversary, and in January we finally purchased our very first TV. Discovering the wonders of Netflix, we can now watch an entire movie in an evening, and I’m guaranteed to end my day with a laugh when I watch “Last Man Standing” with Tim Allen. 

Stay tuned for 2026 when I finally buy my first cell phone.