“How long, O Lord…? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!”

As Psalm 24 has it: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it!”

Do you ever feel caught between those who insist on spreading bad news, and the fears and anxieties that accompany it, and those who insist, ostrich-like, that everything is going to be fine--perhaps because really addressing the underlying causes might cost them too dearly?

Has something shifted lately? Is there something different in the air?

As the pressure mounts to get “back to normal,” we have both the luxury and the challenge of asking “what do we want our new normal to look like?” but more importantly, “what kind of new normal is God leading us into?”

Just when we’ve given up hope, we’ll look back and see that things are already better.

Many of us are still “coming up for air” from the suffocating isolation of a year mostly apart. But aside from conforming to on-going public health measures, the challenges before us aren’t terribly new--and neither are the opportunities! God is still at work in and among and through us, and sometimes even around us, to make Christ’s love known in Tulsa and beyond.

The point of spiritual disciplines, of course, is not to try to score spiritual “bonus points.” That will always and everywhere eventually lead to a dead end. The point is always to lead us back to the one true source of all genuine trust, hope and love.