On Living in An Atomic Age - C.S. Lewis
There's a band called "Better Oblivion Community Center" that's led by Connor Oberst from Bright Eyes and Phoebe Bridgers. This band has a song called "Didn't Know What I Was In For." The last verse is about the futility of life and the distractions to escape it. Honestly, it sounds a lot like Ecclesiastes. Here are the lyrics:
To fall asleep I need white noise to distract me
Otherwise I have to listen to me think
Otherwise I pace around, hold my breath, let it out
Sit on the couch and think about
How living's just a promise that I made
We Americans are very good at distracting ourselves to stay away from our thoughts. We are not generally a philosophical and introspective people (which is ironic because we are all obsessed with ourselves). But that's all changed recently. There are world changing moments that shake the comfortable out of their beds. WWI. The crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Peal Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. 9/11. And now, Corona.
Our neighbors and friends who are not followers of Jesus are probably sitting at home right now, and for many of them, they are in a crisis moment. Death is real. The world is fleeting. Security is gone. Life is no longer easy. The bubble has been broken.
In 1945 the Manhattan Project finished the atomic bomb. On August 6th, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Bomber, dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and brought WWII to a close. On that day, the world changed forever. Most of us are probably too young to remember this, but the era that followed (the Cold War) was a time of real anxiety and fear. At any moment, it could all be over.
During the Cold War, with the threat of world annihilation on the minds of many, the great Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote a short piece called, "Living in an Atomic Age." That situation is not a 1 to 1 correlation with the Corona pandemic, so please don't see any of this as "Jon says not to worry about Corona." This article is less about what to do in times like these and more about how to think once you’ve been forced to really take a look at the broken world around you.
Here is a video from C.S. Lewis Doodles (a wonderful YouTube channel that just takes C.S. Lewis texts and draws over someone reading.) Take a few minutes, watch this, and then pray for you neighbor next door who may be taking stock of life and death, who is worried about their family, and who desperately needs to encounter the peace of our King Jesus. And then maybe take some time and think about your own life. How has this pandemic forced you to stop and think?