Today we may feel overwhelmed because of economic downturns, political crises, the seeming rise in natural disasters. Social upheavals and changes taking place throughout the world may give us cause to feel uncertain about the future. The extremes of weather, disease, epidemics, and riots may cause us to feel separated from God’s saving love. However, these situations cannot distort the power of divine Love and the spiritual reality Jesus taught his disciples—and us, his followers.
A small example of this happened to me last summer, when I’d begun a project of trimming the trees in our backyard. I had planned to spend one or two hours each afternoon for three days to clear out tree limbs growing too close to our house.
On the day I got started, the temperature was around 100 degrees, and there had been heat warnings on the news. But I figured I would be OK if I was out for just an hour. To reach the limbs and branches, I had to use a 15-foot ladder and then reach up with a 12-foot pole saw. This was no easy task. I was doing fine going up and down the ladder, cutting branches and limbs, and then breaking them up in small pieces and taking them down to a neighborhood compost pile in a ravine below our property. It was after several of these trips as I was walking up out of the ravine that I began to feel faint.
