An Brief Observation on Sudden Onset COVID19 Religiosity
The following is actually from a post I made on my personal Facebook. It was in response to a tweet which made rounds around FB as well. My thoughts below were also influenced by some of my FB friends posting statuses about how they saw everybody (at least their friends) “getting all religious” all of a sudden and why I saw that as a good thing.
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This [the above tweet in question] is similar to my observation when I see others posting about and remarking how “religious” everybody seems to be getting all of a sudden. I always say in response, “that’s a good thing!”
You wanna why people seem to getting “religious” out of nowhere?
We were all made for God and our deepest purpose is rooted in Him, and when you mix a global and pervasive crisis of sickness and death with the complete stripping away of worldly distractions (which may not be bad in themselves) and things feel lonely, then you get down to the brass tax of what is truly important to our existence on this Earth. You get down to the soul and what it really is made for and why sports, movies, bars, and everything else that’s been cancelled don’t truly fulfill us. People are getting “religious” because the only thing we really have at the end of the day is God because we were made to know and love Him, not sports and restaurants. God is not just a higher power but a Person who loves, and our capacity to love other persons come from He whom personhood itself springs from.
However, the problem will these moments is that this sudden religious need is often coupled with a lot of emotion, and when stuff get back to normal we get complacent with our regular things again and start to forget this deep religious and spiritual need because it might have only went surface deep in the first place and never developed further.
This dire moment is only a moment. God desires you for Himself forever. Don’t be afraid to turn all “religious,” ask yourself why people might be doing that anyway especially people we may not expect. Then, removed from all the regular stuff of life because it’s all cancelled, begin to ask yourself the deeper questions of life. Why am I here? Why do I exist? Why does anything exist and not nothing? Does God really exist? If He does and created me, what did He make me for?