DAILY DEVOTIONAL – 3/30/20

 
As a historian, I often look to the past as well as the Bible when I seek to understand something like a pandemic or other significant national or international event or circumstance. And, as I thought about this pandemic and how it is affecting all of us—the entire world, I was reminded of the passage in Ecclesiastes that speaks about there being nothing new under the sun.

To me, that passage helps me understand that a pandemic is not something new. In fact, in the history of the world, there have been several. The Black Death, for example, in the fourteenth century, which was the deadliest. But there are others that touched great swaths of the human population.

So here’s what I have to offer today. The world has been here before. In fact, Midland has been here before. Near the end of the First World War 1918 a flu epidemic swept the world in three separate waves, killing millions. There was no vaccine, no antiviral, not antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections such as pneumonia. Victims died within hours or days of developing symptoms, their lungs filling with fluid. (I wrote about this epidemic and its effects on Midland in a blog on the Midland County Historical Society webpage. You can read it at http://midlandhistoricalsociety.com/ Select “Midland History Musings” and scroll down to “The Year of the Great Flu”).

In the second wave, from September to November 1918, 20,000 Texans died. By the end of the third wave in mid-1919, somewhere between 675,000 to 850,000 Americans died! What made this flu so deadly was that those most vulnerable were young people between the ages of 20 and 40. This range of course included all those young men we recruit to fight our wars, collecting them together in close quarters, where the disease could ravage them. In fact, more U. S. soldiers died from the flu than in battle, some 43,000 of them.
To make it worse, many countries brought their soldiers home as the war ended and they returned with no quarantine process, carrying the disease into their communities. The world death count was somewhere between 20 and 40 million people.

To combat the spread of disease, social distancing and isolation was used, much as it is today. Schools closed; churches closed; funerals had time limits; stores shortened their hours. Where those measures were strongly taken and followed, fewer died. A lesson for us today.

Midland had 160 flu cases by October 1918. Dr. John Thomas, Midland Health Officer, announced in the paper that schools and churches were closed. There would be no public gatherings. The paper added its own warning that coughs and sneezes were “as dangerous as poison gas shells” (Poison gas was one of the horrors of combat used in the war). The pastor at our church, the only Methodist church in town at that time, was Reverend J. W. Cowan. Reverend Cowan’s own son, Luke, had enlisted, only to die of meningitis, another victim of disease.

In the First Methodist archives is an old journal that contains the Quarterly Conference Record of the Midland Episcopal Church, South (as we were then officially known). Revered Cowan wrote, in shaky handwriting that still reflects his sorrow, “We have had a great deal of sickness. The Death Angel has brought to us sore sadness and bitter sorrow of heart. Much uncertainty and anxiety have been caused by the long, continued drought and the war has exacted from us its toll of both money and means, some twenty of our members of our choice young men have gone from us to give their services to their country’s cause.”

So here is my thought for us from history. This pandemic, this passage into a new reality, a different world is not something new. Revered Cowan and the Methodist congregation of those days were in a very different world when those terrible times had passed. They were in a different place but, as Pastor Kurt has reminded us, God was with them in that place.

And the world they lived in from then perished in the hard years of the Great Depression and World War II. And that congregation found themselves in a different place, but God was in that place as well. And, in fact, many of us found ourselves in a different world after the events of September 11, 2001 shook the world.

So, as we look forward to passing through the tribulations of this time to arrive at what we believe will be a better day, let us remember that however changed and different, easy or difficult, we find that new place to be God is with us in that place.

While not exactly a traditional prayer, I believe some other words from Reverend Cowan can serve to help us focus less on the fears of today. In closing his April 23, 1918 report he wrote, “With unabating faith in God, praying and trusting for divine leadership, and with a sincere desire to do acceptable service, we will continue to bend our energies in our God-given work.”

Questions:

1. Can you recall times in your own life where you went through a time that brought you to a different place and how you discovered that God was with you in that place?
2. In a time when many grab what they can for themselves or ignore how their actions endanger others, what actions can you take in the new few days and weeks that may help save or restore others from illness, from fears, for losses?

Ecclesiastes 1: 9-10

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new?” It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.