Written by Jonathan Bowell

In Greek mythology there was once a giant named Antaeus, the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaea. Not surprisingly, Antaeus was a powerful warrior--but not in the way you might expect. His source of strength came from his mother, the earth, so that every time he was thrown to the ground he would rise stronger than before. The more times he landed on his back, the more powerful he became.

If your news feeds, Facebook walls, and conversations with friends are anything like mine, you are inundated with bad news. Not that they are telling you something you didn’t already know. Many of you are facing the prospect of job loss, social isolation, sickness, and even death. On the surface, the bad news abounds. But in God’s world, which is precisely where we are, he is always up to something. We have a Father who rules over all things and uses the waves of suffering that slam against our life to wash us upon the shore of his grace. Because His Spirit lives within us, we have a “super power” similar to that of Antaeus whereby suffering is repurposed into strength.

South City Church has recently experienced this firsthand through open doors at Blackwell Elementary School in South Richmond. We originally planned to move our Sunday gathering to Blackwell last weekend, but, because of the school shutdown, a different kind of service began, not on Sundays but throughout the week as we participated in their food distribution program for families who rely on the school for daily meals. It has only been five days, but I have built meaningful relationships with the kitchen staff, the volunteers, and the families who came to receive food each day. I became fast friends with Janice, Mark, Chefonya, John, Yvette and others. We prayed each morning with the kitchen staff to start the day and were able to pray with 62 people from the community throughout the week!

Many church plants spend years--even decades--building enough trust to gain passport into their community. For us it happened in a matter of days, so much so that Yvette invited me into her pain from losing her cousin this past week and asked if I would be willing to officiate a small memorial service for her family. You can’t make this stuff up but God makes it happen because he loves Yvette, and the families of Blackwell, and South City Church, and me, and you.

Talk to me two weeks ago and you would have heard a torrent of fear, doubt, and complaining. Something like, “How are you supposed to plant a church during a time like this!?” or, “We built all this momentum only to slam into a wall!” or, my personal favorite, “We’re not gonna make it.” But God is reminding me that suffering is not an insurmountable obstacle but an instrumental opportunity. COVID-19 is not a constraint--it is a catalyst.

Could it be that the obstacles you fear are actually opportunities? Perhaps God will open doors for your church to serve the needs of the elderly in your community. Perhaps He will give you that chance you’ve been looking for to share the hope of Christ with your neighbor down the street who is about to get laid off from their job. Perhaps He will use your financial hardship, loneliness and even sickness to pull you closer to himself to prepare you for a new season of ministry he’s about to launch you into.

The day will come when we all look back at this pandemic and say along with Paul that it "has actually served to advance the Gospel” (Phil. 1:12), but the sooner we recognize it, the sooner we can regain what the church has always been marked by: our compassion and our courage. The Coronavirus will throw many of us down, but by God’s grace we will rise from our knees stronger than before.