Thought for the week

Keep Calm and Carry On?

I don’t know about you but right now the easing of lockdown restrictions doesn’t feel like the victory and celebration that I’d anticipated.

In Wales we are now in level 2 alert and so much has now reopened and been permissioned once again. And yet….

Yet, we are hearing every day now about the Indian variant of the Covid 19 virus: the thousands that are tragically dying in India and the transmissibility of it over here in the UK. The threat of this pandemic has clearly not totally gone away.

The confusion and frustration seems to continue and it’s hard to live like this.

It is, therefore, trite to hear the clichéd phrase to ‘keep calm and carry on’ and attach any credence to it. And yet…. a part of the story of God’s people reminded me of something I read in the bible recently.

The story has similarities to ours. The Israelites finally escaped their Egyptian enemy after experiencing the miracle of Moses parting the Red Sea.

They escaped slavery and had their celebration party.

Then they arrived in a desert where the water was too bitter to drink and there was no food.

It felt like a hollow victory. Despite their newly found freedom the hardship didn’t immediately go away.

God reminded the Israelites that He would fight for them and they should ‘just stay calm.’ (Exodus 14 verse 14) He tells us the same thing.

It’s not a case of keeping calm and carrying on, rather a sense of keeping calm because God is fighting for us.

He is on our side and He will provide the means for us to survive our present hardships just as He did for the Israelites who eventually reached their Promised Land.