Great Plains Daily Devotional for 4/10/2020

Isaiah 65:17 

For I am about to create new heavens
    and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
    or come to mind.

The neighborhood I grew up in was full of older two-story houses that had been built in the 19-teens and early '20s. The house I grew up in was built in 1912 by my grandparents. Almost all of the houses had front porches that stretched the width of the house and they sat on 50-foot-wide lots. When the weather was nice, people sat out on their front porches. We knew who lived in every house on the block -- who was kid friendly and whose lawn to stay off of. In summertime, we would play until late in the evening, only coming in when it was time to get ready for bed.

I believe there will be good things that will come out of our forced isolation this spring. I hope we will be tired of trying to stay connected through our electronic devices and find the joy in face-to-face interaction. I hope we will have learned to appreciate all of the people who have kept our world from coming apart at the seams -- from medical personnel to truck drivers to grocery store clerks to gas station attendants. I hope we will have learned to be less wasteful with our resources. I hope we regain some skills that seemed on their way to being lost -- cooking a meal from basic ingredients, how to bake bread, how to make do with what we have and be thankful for what we have. I hope we will have learned what the church really means -- how good it is to come together as a body to worship and the new ways we have learned to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the community.

The choice is ours. We can go back to our old ways when this pandemic is over, or we can hit the reset button and choose to create a better world for our children and grandchildren. We can create a world that looks a little more like the Kingdom of God.

 

Prayer for Reflection

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42