Skip to main content

We Will Feast in the House of Zion by Patience Griswold

No one ever plans to have their lives upended. We know that the world is broken and bound in futility, we know that everything can change in an instant, and yet crises still have the ability to shake us to our core. None of us entered 2020 planning to experience a global pandemic this year, but here we are, practicing social distancing, wondering how the virus will affect us and our families, and wondering when we will be able to return to our regular rhythms and routines as what can feel a little like the world falling apart around us. 

In the midst of social distancing, I miss my church family. I miss my Bible study, the kids in my Sunday school class, the ability to meet people for coffee, and I know that I am not alone in this. It is not wrong to grieve the temporary loss of these things. In fact, we ought to grieve, even as we seek to live joyfully and find satisfaction in Christ in the midst of difficult circumstances. If we feel no grief whatsoever over the loss of something good, we might ask ourselves if we ever believed that it was good in the first place. Grieving when we lose something good is a sign that we felt the goodness of what we had and cherished it as we ought. 

We are created for community with God and with one another. We learn in the garden of Eden that it is not good for man to be alone and that we are not created for solitude. This is reaffirmed in the New Testament where we see that the Christian life is meant to be lived in community. We are members of the household of God, being built together into a holy temple (Ephesians 2:19-22), a royal priesthood and a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9), and one body (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). The individual members and parts of nations, households, temples, and bodies do not live and exist separate from one another, but in community with one another. This is why we feel so keenly the loss of community in the midst of a pandemic and why we grieve that temporary loss. 

At the same time, God pours out his grace in the midst of crisis. I do not know the mind of God in the midst of COVID-19, but I am certain that he is doing more things than I can possibly imagine and I believe that one of the things he is doing is using this outbreak to deepen our desire for community. The way that technology enables us to connect with one another while apart is an incredible blessing, and we ought to utilize it to follow the exhortation not to neglect to meet together (Hebrews 10:25), but it can never replace physical presence. 

Shortly before the state of emergency was declared, a discussion at Bible study brought to mind Sandra McCraken’s song “We Will Feast in the House of Zion.” For the past week and a half, this song has been a comforting reminder to me that a day is coming when we will not experience the break in fellowship that we are feeling right now. Right now, we are “in the dark of night before the dawn” but morning is coming and when morning comes, we will feast in the house of Zion, where death and disease, frailty, fear, and panic cannot so much as touch us. We will experience unbroken fellowship in the presence of God with our brothers and sisters in Christ from every nation, tribe, and tongue. We will feast with our hearts restored and it will be a glorious day! 

Our current state of dispersion is a reminder that we are, for now, exiles awaiting our true home. The temporary loss of community reminds us of the preciousness of what we are missing and teaches us to look forward in hope to the day when we will feast in the house of Zion. May this current season in which we are physically separated from one another strengthen our love for the body of Christ and make us long more deeply for a day when pandemics are no more and when we forever dwell in the house of God with the people of God. 

Comments

  1. Thank you, Patience, for your wonderful article. Your writing is blessed.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To Have My Soul Happy in the Lord, by George Muller

To Have My Soul Happy in the Lord By George Muller “It has pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, the benefit of which I have not lost for more than fourteen years. The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, or how I might glorify the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. “I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God—not prayer, but the Word of God. And here again, not the simple reading of the Word of God so that it only passes through my mind just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what I read, pondering over it, and applying it to my heart. To meditate on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed. And that thus,...

Reflective Glory: How the Moon Displays the Mercy of God

Our sun is a fitting metaphor for the glory of God. In the context of our solar system, it is massive, bright, beautiful, powerful, self-sufficient, heat-producing, life-giving, and dangerous. It is, by far, the dominant feature of our solar system and without it the system would fling apart and all living things therein would die.  On the other hand, our moon is a fitting metaphor for human beings, especially for those who believe in Jesus Christ. First, compared to the sun, the moon is tiny and dim. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon, its mass is 27 million times greater than the mass of the moon, and from our perspective its light shines 450,000 times brighter than that of the moon. The sun is so much greater than the moon that it’s difficult to quantify and express the difference. Likewise, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is so much great than each and all of us that it’s impossible to quantify or express the difference. Indeed, the Lord is very great and greatly...

When Children Say "I'm Bored" By Julie Lowe

This Article is written by Julie Lowe and was originally posted on the CCEF blog.  I highlighted the areas of particular interest. I had already prepared a blogpost on dealing with boredom from a Christian worldview and then came across this. There is much overlap between the two, perhaps this one is more concise while my work attempts to explain the connection between the ability to think and the ability to be happy. You can visit the original blogpost in the link provided below.  https://www.ccef.org/resources/blog/children-say-im-bored   We have a common crisis in our home; it is the calamity of boredom. Our children might even consider it a catastrophe. “I’m bored” is repeated so often it would not be an overstatement to say that these words echo continuously throughout our home especially during any break from school. These are children with limited media time but still children with a Wii and Xbox system, a pool outside our door, multiple games, toy...