Where is God in the COVID-19 Crisis?

Does God meet us when we have disappointments, lost dreams, disillusionments, disease and death?  Those are questions that I ask myself and God, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The virus rattled us.  We had assumptions that life would be normal and we had the illusion that we could control our lives.  The pandemic ambushed us and all the assumptions.  Now nothing seems certain. 

We grieved for things that we planned and for things that will never be. We grieved when graduations were altered, when weddings were postponed, when loved ones were hospitalized and for the staggering number of people who died from COVID-19, both those who we knew and those reported on the news.

We grieve

 I have not added a post in a few months because I have been depleted from my job as a chaplain in a hospital overflowing with COVID-19 patients.  The word exhaustion is a good word to explain how I have felt both physically and emotionally. Our hospital was hit with a third wave in November 2020 that lasted almost four months. Walking into the hospital for me in those months seemed like walking into a dark cloud.

 I provided emotional and spiritual care to patients, their families and our staff. Even though I did not physically visits patients with COVID-19, I called them or their families on the phone.  In addition, I gave support, comfort and encouragement to our staff with prayers, Scripture and reassurance.

From the families and patients I heard of serious illness, long term complications of COVID and of deaths.  I listened to the heartbreaking and depressing accounts of those who had the virus and of the families who lost loved ones to the disease.  I heard of mothers dying, fathers dying, teenagers dying and as many as four member of a family dying.  These stories were horrific. 

Many times I felt helpless in my care for them; all I could do is join them in their sadness, anguish and fear.  I prayed with them, ached with them, cried with them and reassured them that God was with them even when they felt they were in a lonely, dry and deserted place.  I have had to push through my own physical and emotional exhaustion.

An emergency nurse told me that there was nothing in her training or career that prepared her for the frequency and numbers of the deaths that she had witnessed.  I heard repeatedly from staff that no amount of time off or sleep helped restore them to feeling rested.  However, I witnessed heroes among the staff who had set aside their own doubts and worries to serve those hurting physically.  I witnessed the staff push through their own physical and emotional fatigue. Courage and strength mixed with their medical knowledge showed up in each room to give healing care. What heroes they were!

The COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit had the sickest patients with most of them on ventilators. The worst week in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit was a week at the end of February 2021 when eight people died of COVID complications in 24 hours.  That week a total of 17 patients died in that 24 bed unit.  It was almost impossible to comprehend and process all those deaths and all the suffocating grief.  No words are adequate!

Suffocating Grief

All of us at the hospital, chaplains included have been deeply marked with the trauma of this year – both a weariness to the bones and being permanent imprinted by the trauma.

One of the feelings that we all experienced in this time of COVID-19 is loss. That feeling of loss is grief. Grief is the digestion of feelings of loss.

We all observed grief in others and in ourselves. Grief is an emotion that we may not understand and do not have a roadmap to show us the way.

Grief is not comfortable

not easy

not predictable

not controllable.

Grief seems to come in waves, washing over us and causing us to have trouble even catching our breath. It catches us off guard. Then, grief abates for a time to cause us to think that we have weathered the storm only to be hit with another surge of grief.

Grief allows us to digest the loss

This has truly been a year of titanic losses.  Grief processes those losses and grief in itself is a process.  One of the frustrating parts of grief is that the process cannot be hurried. C.S. Lewis explored grief that brings despair and that grief is a process in his book A Grief Observed.

Grief humbled us because we are not in control.  Grief became a common denominator we had with others who we hardly knew.

In witnessing grief in myself and in others, a word comes to my mind, lament.  It is a word seldom used in our common speech.  Lament has the idea of passionate expression of sorrow, regret, grief or mourning.

A highly respected theologian, N. T. Wright, wrote an invitation to lament in in his book, God and the Pandemic:  A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath.

“In a time of acute crisis, when death sneaks into houses and shops, when you may feel healthy yourself but you may be carrying the virus without knowing it, when every stranger on the street is a threat, when we go around in masks, when churches are shut and people are dying with nobody to pray by their bedside – this is a time for lament.”  

Certainly, the effects of COVID on our lives and on the lives of others calls us to lament. 

It is okay to lament. Permission granted to lament. 

When I join others in their grief and in their lament, I sensed a sacredness in joining them. I sense a shared tenderness in those moments. We console each other.

God also joins each one in their grief.  A familiar passage from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” (Matthew 5:4).  This is a promise given that is unconditional to those who mourn.

God carries us unexpectedly through the mourning. I don’t understand how God does carries us. It is a mystery how God comforts, a mystery meaning that it transcends our understanding.

I often use an image to comfort patients in time of serious grief.  I hold out my cupped hands and say that God’s grace comes under us and carries us along.  At the time we do not realize that God’s grace is holding us but when we look back, we can see that a supernatural strength was holding us. 

God holds us through our sorrow, cradling our fragile emotions.

God brings consolation along with reassurance and a divine embrace.

It may not be obvious at the time and it may seem that God is silent in our sorrow but when we look back at those moments of intense grief, we can see that God was with us. 

God was with us whether it be in another person sitting with us, a hug or gentle touch or a peace that passes understanding or some kind of memory at that moment that give us joy.  Often an inspiring moment in nature is a time when God shows up in our grief. Sometimes gratitude is experienced in reflection.  Sometimes a reassurance comes like an unexplained calmness during a time of grief and sometimes we learn not to be afraid of grief.

God meets us in our grief.  God comes alongside of us in our distress and mourning.  God understands our lament.  We have assurance that we are not alone.

I do not know where God will show up with each of us in our grief, but God will.

Look for a surprising divine encounter in your grief. Maybe you already have, share that divine glimpse of God’s supernatural gracing carrying you.