Luke
21:11 (KJV): And great earthquakes shall
be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great
signs shall there be from heaven.
I provide broadcast
captioning for television. On any given day, especially on the weekends, I
might caption five or more hours of sports. Baseball, basketball, and hockey
are the three main ones, but I also caption football, all kinds—American,
Australian, and real football—the kind that consumes the hearts of sports
fanatics in Europe.
All of that ended with the
shutdown of sports. I used to wonder what would happen if people didn’t have sports
to watch. For many, it’s an addiction—to escape from problems, to enjoy a
pastime, to be entertained, and on and on. I waited a long time to caption
sports until my children were much older. I could never see myself captioning
a baseball game into the thirteenth inning and serving dinner two hours late
with a two-year-old and nine-year-old waiting to be fed.
But eventually, I did caption
sports; first baseball, then basketball, and then all the rest. Last week on
ESPN, I captioned a fiery knife thrower, bare-hand fish hunters, and hill rollers—or something
like that.
I never quite got the gist of that last sport that took place in the
U.K., but it was obvious the sports producer was digging into the very bottom
of the sports barrel hoping live sports would be resurrected soon.
So now, instead of captioning
baseball—my favorite sport to caption—I’m captioning Coronavirus press conferences
of President Trump, governors around the country, city mayors, local doctors,
nurses, and even recovering Coronavirus patients. I had to come up with a good brief
for hydroxychloroquine.
Who would have thought I would ever need to know what that word meant?
It’s only been three months since Christmas and the
entire world is affected. Because I’m such a conspiracy nut, I knew about the
virus in Wuhan probably before most people did. It was barely mentioned in the news,
and I have to admit, I never expected it to become what it is now.
Even with all the books, I’ve read and YouTube videos I’ve
watched dealing with apocalyptic scenarios, partly out of my own interest but
also as research for my Seventh Dimension
Series, I can’t remember seeing anything that took on the scope of this
pandemic, although I have heard scientists predict that we were past due for flu similar to the Spanish flu of 1918.
I also can’t remember anything on a global scale that
has affected me personally to this degree since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was
living in Atlanta at the time, and my mother had just remarried. I remember the
drills the elementary school conducted, that if something were to happen, to
run into the hallway and cover our heads. I remember my mother and new father
showing me how to walk home from school if the worst happened.
We had just moved
with their marriage the previous week, and I was living in an unfamiliar part
of town. I remember them telling me what would be safe to eat, that anything in
a can would be okay, but practically nothing else. And I was acutely aware of
death—of my own, theirs, or classmates. I had a scary feeling that my world, as
tenuous as it was, might soon come to an end.
That was fifty-seven years ago. I was in first grade. I
hardly knew anyone because I had just enrolled in that school, and because we were
living in a different apartment, I didn’t know a soul. While John F. Kennedy
wasn’t a perfect president, he was certainly the man for the hour. He stood up
to Cuba, and a nuclear war was averted.
Whether you love Trump or hate him, I would encourage
you as an American to support him. We need everyone to come together and to do
their part to help us get through this. The one thing I keep hearing over and
over is that people need to stay home. By staying home, we can slow down the
exponential increase in cases, hopefully long enough to spread out the need for
ventilators over a longer period to save lives.
Many years ago, when my daughter, Joy, was in third
grade, I got the shingles. I’d never had shingles and didn’t know what it was,
but my eye was a mess and it hurt. I finally made an appointment with an ophthalmologist,
in between a hectic captioning schedule to see what was going on. The doctor
examined me and said I had an eye infection. As an afterthought, I said, “You
know, I also have this rash on my forehead.”
The doctor stopped what he was doing and examined my
forehead. Immediately he exclaimed, “You’ve got shingles.”
My mother had had shingles, and she had told me more
than once how painful it was. No wonder I was in so much pain. The doctor
looked at my eye again and shook his head. “It’s a wonder you didn’t lose your
eyesight. If the spread had gone down instead of up, you would have.”
I went home that night thankful that somebody
discovered a cure for shingles and that in a few days I’d feel much better. I
don’t remember many shows I’ve captioned over ten years ago, but I remember the
show I did that night. It was on QVC, and the woman was from Asia and spoke
with the heaviest accent you could have and still call it English. I couldn’t
open that eye, and so I captioned that hour-long show squinting in pain in a
language that sounded nothing like English. I hope they sold some jewelry that
night. If they did, I’m sure it wasn’t because of my perfect captions. Lord
only knows what I wrote!
But that isn’t the end of the story. I got better
within a few days. Life seemed to return to normal, and I went out of town on a
trip, only to get a phone call from my dear friend who was taking care of my
daughters.
“I think Joy has chickenpox,” Sylvia said.
“What? No, she can’t have chickenpox. She had chickenpox
when she was a baby.” Or did she?
Joy had broken out in a rash while on vacation in
Destin, Florida, and I had taken her to the emergency clinic. The doctor said
he was ninety percent sure it was chickenpox. So I took his word for it and
never got her the vaccine. Well, I guess she didn’t have chickenpox after all.
I returned home from my out-of-town trip early, took her to the pediatrician,
and received the diagnosis: chickenpox.
So Joy stayed home from school and gymnastics practice
for the next seven to ten days. Unexpectedly, after she returned to school, she
came home with a letter from the school principal that went something like
this: It has come to our attention that we have had an outbreak of chickenpox in
our school. Several cases have been reported, and if your child breaks out with
a rash, has a fever…”
When Joy returned to her gymnastic class, I heard through
the gossip mill of mothers that several gymnasts had recently come down with
chickenpox.
I didn’t have the guts or heart to tell those parents
it was because of me. I got the shingles, Joy caught the chickenpox from me,
and then she passed it on to several students and gymnasts, and those kids
probably shared it with others I never knew about.
Fortunately, enough kids had been immunized and enough
adults had had the chickenpox as children that it didn’t turn into an epidemic.
I bring that story up here to stress how important it is that we take measures
to avoid contact with others during this Coronavirus Crisis. There is no
treatment and there is no vaccine. Therefore, some people who get it will not
have the resources to fight it and will die. There aren’t enough ventilators
for those who might have trouble breathing. For the first time in U.S. history,
we may have to triage patient care. That means somebody will have to choose who
will live and who will die.
Coronavirus is spreading at an unprecedented rate.
To have something this deadly overtake so many countries around the world at
once is unimaginable. If someone had predicted this beforehand, they would have
been written off as a conspiracy nut. I know. I’ve been called that by one of
my kids.
CLICK TO TWEET: The truth is I believe we are heading into a time period that was predicted in the Bible over two thousand years ago. The word “pestilence” in Luke 20 is associated with a specific period of calamity.
We’ve seen a dramatic rise in earthquakes over the last few years. Famines around the world
have increased, and I would not be surprised to see “wonders” in the sky in the
not-too-distant future. Steve Cioccolanti, a pastor in Australia with Discover
Ministries, who also teaches Biblical prophecy and its intersection with current
events, believes we are at the opening of the third seal, the third horse of
the apocalypse.
Revelation
6:5-6 (KJV): And when he
had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, “Come and see.” And I
beheld, and lo, a black horse, and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in
his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, “A measure
of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou
hurt not the oil and the wine.”
Pastor Cioccolanti believes the opening of the seals
happens before the seven-year tribulation. If that is true, we may be closer to
the return of Christ than many of us have imagined.
I encourage everyone to stay at home, read books,
spend quality time with family, and pray. Pray that God will use the Coronavirus
to show people that even though our lives can quickly change, God is
unchanging. Jesus Christ is our rock, our hope, and our salvation.
Take time to read the Book of Daniel and the Book
of Revelation. Ask God to help you reprioritize what’s most important. Eat
well to build up your immune system. Take vitamin C and vitamin D. Pray for President
Trump and all of our leaders, our doctors and nurses, and our pastors. The
emotional impact may be exhausting. Pray for one other, that God will meet our needs—financial,
spiritual, and physical—to help us through this difficult time.
