Jason Swan Clark - Podcast Jason Swan Clark

On New Year eve a short reflection in the face of what we might be hoping to avoid in 2022, after the experience of 2020 and 2021…So as we go into 2022, how is your perception? Are you suffering from target fixation and perceptual narrowing? Are you struggling not to hit the dangers and things you want to miss?

Faith often falters in the face of suffering and loss. Christianity is not about avoiding suffering through some name it and claim it superstition, and it is also not a stoical fatalism and the mere acceptance of fate. Instead, it is something radically different, of participation and transformation that can be practiced, whereby our faith begins to grow and grow instead of dissipating.

Denial does not protect but traps us and deceives us, keeping us from the experience of death and resurrection. Just as its opposite psychological sibling, fatalism overwhelms and destroys us, keeping us buried in the tomb of loss. Both snuff out real Faith.

Perhaps COVID is the great compression, an intensifier, and the great revealing. What has manifest was already there, something underneath that came to the surface under the intense pressures of COVID. COVID was not the cause of many things. It just took what was there and revealed it.

So many words have been used to chronicle and delineate this pandemic. The great _____(insert your choice of adverbial word or phrase); reset, leveller, pause, accelerator, resignation, etc. I prefer the descriptor of 'disruption'. Perhaps the 'Great Unsettling' is a better diagnostic word and account of our time….But what if the nature of COVID or its length meant something else. Indeed what if this moment, this disruption, was a chance to wake up. And to stop putting off all the things I want to be as a Christian and know I could be.

We are entering what is known as the 'recovery phase' of a disaster, and it is the most prolonged phase, taking years. Adrenalin is spent. Exhaustion sets in. Losses have to be counted and processed. Rebuilding in the face of loss takes an effort amid depletion of resources, emotional and financial. But Jesus has a route through it for us, if we choose Him.