My daughter Adelaide wrote this last night; I thought it was so encouraging I wanted to share it here (with Adelaide’s permission!)
Adelaide writes: I applied for a refund for my plane ticket to the UK tonight. I was due to leave in 10 days. And that was really difficult. This self-organised gap year I have been planning since the end of 2018 and is something that I have been so looking forward to for the past year and a bit and I have appreciated my family’s, church family’s and friend’s concerns and prayers about it, even though my travel plans may seem small compared to everything else going on at the moment.
I remember after I had booked my flights in early Jan understanding that I had made these plans, but ultimately knowing that they were now in God’s hands, not my own. I remember praying over uncertainty as to whether those plans would go ahead – but what I didn’t know is that they actually weren’t going to and (literally!) God knows when they will.
I am sad. Very sad. But I am not upset, nor am I angry at the world or at God. Because God is good and he is good ALL of the time, not just when my plans in life are going ahead.
My God loves me so much that he sent his one and only Son to die for me so that my eternity would be secure.
COVID-19 is a tremendously sad and difficult reminder that this world is a broken and fragile world and that is a reality. However, it also reminds me that lasting security is not to be found in this present time, rather in the time to come.
Keep loving each other by practicing personal hygiene, self-isolating if you need to in order to not put others at risk, calling up or visiting your friends and your family or those who may not have any friends or family to ask them how they are doing and offer to help. Do not be greedy in what you are purchasing at the shops. Pray for your community, your country, your governments and the world as we all navigate the destruction that this virus is bringing not just to our own lives but in the lives of every single person in this world.
Know that God is watching over it all. He has not left the world and he sees everything that happens and he has known that this was going to happen since the beginning of eternity, and he knows what every day in the future holds.
He is sad when he sees what is going on, and yet he is a God of compassion, who has given the world a rescue plan. And that rescue plan is his son Jesus, who offers every person a free gift of a secure eternity with him through his death and resurrection on the cross.
And as I delete events from my google calendar and as I grow anxious about the unknown future, I have been reflecting on this passage which my mum reminded me of.
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
Matthew 6:25-34
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Keep loving each other, and if you don’t already know Jesus, consider the security, hope and peace that he brings.
I certainly am clinging to him.
Adelaide Windsor, 18 March 2020