by Victoria Trubeck

There’s something that I would like to share with you that has been burning in me since the coronavirus outbreak began. In light of the extraordinary period that we are living in right now, when our day to day reality has been disrupted and we don’t know what to expect, many of us are asking, “Why is this happening? How and when is this all going to end?”

Looking for answers is a perfectly natural human thing to do. More than that, we are living in a generation that is used to having an abundance of information at its fingertips: a steady stream of news, information and updates are available to us on our smartphones at any given moment so that we can always know what’s happening right now. The one piece of information that is sorely missing from all our information options is: what is going to happen next? One of the greatest challenges that most of us are facing right now is uncertainty, the inability to plan and navigate our lives in the near future because we don’t know what will be the day after tomorrow or even three months from now.

Are We Turning Prophetic Words into Horoscopes?

One of the things that I’m discovering when I look at my Instagram or Facebook feeds is that people are frantic for answers and solutions: “This is going to be over by Passover!” I saw a video post that someone shared which calculated the gematria values of the Hebrew word “coronavirus” and the Hebrew phrase “after Passover” to prove that the coronavirus will be gone after Passover. As much as I found that post ridiculous and humorous, it clearly shows how desperately we want to be able to determine when this will end so that we can get back to our day to day lives. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know when we can get back to our lives. It’s also possible that we will never get back to the “business as usual” that we knew before corona. I can’t count the number of posts I have seen which cite this prophet or that word saying “It’s all going to be over by this and this time” or “It is all going to end this way…”

If clouds are full of water,
they pour rain on the earth.
Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where it falls, there it will lie.
  Whoever watches the wind will not plant;
whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.

  As you do not know the path of the wind,
or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God,
the Maker of all things.

~Ecclesiastes 11:3-5

Our ability to comprehend God’s plans and ways are limited. Always looking to external sources that may be as wily as the wind and clouds in order to figure out what to do will cause us to be inactive and unfruitful. If our focus is on the latest prophetic update or the latest word from this or that high profile preacher or speaker, we will most definitely miss the incredible opportunity that God is giving us right now: He wants to teach us something about the things we actually have control over in our lives—the condition of our hearts: what motivates us, what is the state of our thought-life, how are our relationships with others?

An Amazing Opportunity

More than anything, this crisis is offering us an incredible opportunity to bring our hearts before the Lord. And if we make that our focus during this time, we will be less drawn to trying to figure out the external issues at play in this pandemic and focus on that which will be fruitful and bring a harvest in our lives. In that place, I believe that God will give each one of us His deep understanding through time in prayer and meditation on His Word. He will renew and re-calibrate our understanding of the truly important things in our lives, like our relationships with our families and loved ones, how to let God transform us into better people through this, and how we can be there for others during this crisis who are in worse situations than our own.