Guest blog — Duane T. Harder

“And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you” (Ps 39:7).

Our hope might be fixed on the gift of our dreams. That hope is called wishful thinking. But hope in Christ is not one of wishful thinking. We might also have hope that is rooted in the expectation of our investment. The farmer prepares the soil, plants the seed, natures the land and lives in hope of a good crop. We invest time and resource and live in expectation of a return. Any number of unexpected intrusions can shatter that hope.

International travel is never without stress, but our experience this week took discomfort to a new level.

We were sitting in an airport hotel in London trying vainly to sleep, as the overnight hours ticked by for our early morning check-in. There was only one problem. The Canadian government requires travelers to produce results of a COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival in Canada. But labs are not necessarily equipped to come up with the results that quickly. In the end, I spent half the night sending emails and making desperate calls, and a very kind supervisor expedited the results.

I am pretty well finished writing another book. The topic this time is the meaning of freedom from a Biblical perspective.

One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is the fact my freedom is restricted by the people around me. You could say “Welcome to the pandemic!” But it’s more the case that the pandemic has provided an opportunity to find out something the Bible teaches but we often ignore because we don’t like it.

For the past year governments around the world have been trying to control a public health emergency by curtailing liberties most of us would never have thought we would have to give up.

In an authoritarian state like China, the government simply imposes what measures it wants and people have to submit. In democratic nations, it’s a little harder than that. You have to persuade people to go along.

Pressure reveals the person.

It’s always when things are tough and the stress piles on that what’s underneath emerges.

When all our kids were young and I was running a church office out of my home, the phone often rang right in the middle of some kind of family pandemonium. Our daughter Anna used to yell “Quiet!” at the top of her lungs, then in the ensuing moment of silence would pick the phone up with an ultra-competent voice saying, “Campbell’s. How can I help you?” No one ever knew what had been going on a split second before.