Even when it seems like the people of God are dormant and we start to wonder if we are all alone, God is still loving. He even speaks in Babylon. He even moves amongst the darkest nights. The world might not be going all that well, but God is still God, and as we get a glimpse of Him, He is still revealed as glorious and majestic and wise and holy and sovereign. 

All the while, I am all too aware, that the reality of the world and my experience of it is now, in front of me, making up the substance of my life through a series of present tense happenings, or as Annie Dillard famously and rightly said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”  Said another way, our life is the net result of billions of “nows” where we have the opportunity to be present to reality, and we also have temptation to escape it by looking longingly, or loathingly, either forward or back.

It isn’t lost on me that the most discouraging Sunday in church ministry is often the Sunday after Easter, as auditoriums and parking lots return to normal and as people’s sense of the reality of Christ’s resurrection seems like a distant memory.

Part of this discouragement is because we do measure the wrong things and I know that. We usually measure number of attenders, which is an interesting metric, but not a real guage on the impact that the gospel is having on a group of people. But, part of this discouragement is the nagging sense that we know that if we were all really paying attention to the reality of the resurrection, then every Sunday would feel like Easter Sunday. The fact that it doesn’t just shows what a distracted group of people we are.