Making Things Better (Friday Devotional)

 

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

- Matthew 7:12

When I look out my office window, I can see the police setting up placards and orange barriers in the football stadium’s parking lot. Further down Centerville Road, an electronic sign advertises the reason: for the first time since summer 2020, the parking lot is being turned into a temporary COVID testing site. Here we go again.

More and more, the feeling of déjà vu is almost insurmountable. Grocery store shelves are empty. Friends are quarantining for the week after potential exposure. COVID is not only on the front page, but front of mind.

In so many ways, it feels like spring of 2020 all over again. After lockdown, after months of masking, after the hope of vaccination, here we are again, hunkering down and praying we don’t spike a fever. Here we are ordering at-home COVID tests online, moving meetings from in-person to Zoom, adjusting our expectations to meet the moment. It’s worth asking: when will things get better?

When asked from 30,000 feet, the only honest answer is “I don’t know.” This current omicron wave is expected to peak in a week or two, but from there we really have no idea whether there will be another variant and, if so, what it will look like. Economists can speculate, but no one can say with certainty whether prices will come back down or continue to rise. Businesses and schools and churches can try to read the tea leaves, but the reality is that their decisions will continue being made on a week-to-week basis. If you’re looking at life in a broad sense, there’s no telling when things will start to improve.

But that reality makes it all the more necessary for you to do your part, however big or small, to make things better. You can’t bring gas prices down, but you can give a 7-11 gift card to your neighbor down the street. You can’t keep the schools open, but you can encourage the teachers you know. You can’t make the pandemic go away, but every single day you can combat the despair it brings with gestures of hope.

In a world with so many systemic problems, it’s easy to get discouraged, to think there’s nothing you can do. But the same Golden Rule that you learned as a child, the same Golden Rule that the Law and the Prophets pointed to and that Jesus preached, is still relevant today. If you want the world to be better, if you want your life to be better, start by helping make somebody else’s day better. If enough of us did that, imagine how the world would change.