5 Years After COVID-19: A Reflection

Collin Hansen

If God can work good from the cross of Jesus, he can work good from COVID 19, only God can make known to us the path of life. Only in his presence do we find fullness of joy at his right hand, our pleasures forevermore, nothing, not even COVID 19, can rob us of that promise through union with Christ, whatever our God ordains is right, and someday, thanks to Jesus, will even understand how

Collin Hansen

Where were you on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 it’s five years ago, five consequential years, maybe you’re like me, and it’s one of the few moments in your life where you can remember the exact setting that was the case for me on 911, 2001 and it was the case then March 11, 2020 I was in my Living Room. Was surrounded by a number of close friends, leaders of small groups in our church. These were people who as an elder, I oversaw within our church shepherding structure, and I was telling them a little bit about how that morning, I had told my wife that we needed to stock up on essential supplies, because this COVID thing that we were hearing about in the news was a really big deal, and the rest of the group just laughed at me. They thought this was absurd, that the idea of even a couple weeks of disruption to our lives was was practically unthinkable, and that’s exactly the what happened, even after a few moments, I after that group had departed and I had been the laughing stock, went to check my phone and saw news from The National Basketball Association the NBA star player Rudy gobert had tested positive for COVID. We heard of other news, like Tom Hanks contracting or testing positive for COVID. 19. Subsequently the NBA and then everything else began to quickly shut down our schools, our churches, just about everything else. Well, some of you may have had the experience of at a baseball field or inside a volleyball or basketball gym, of turning off this stadium or overhead lights. You may know that it’s easy to turn them off. You flip the switch, and there you go. It goes to black. But you know that sometimes, depending on the lights, when you’re going to turn them back on, it takes a while for them to warm up and to be able to to shine again. Well, that’s similar to what happened to us with with COVID 19, we found how relatively easy it was, especially under the under the suspicion that this would be a very short duration, two weeks to flatten the curve. We were told that it wouldn’t really be that, that big of a deal. We could shut down. But as it turned out, of course, was this was much longer. And when you turn the lights off on so much of an entire society, some of them never turn on again, and some of them only very slowly, and that’s what we experienced five years ago. On this on this date, we’re going to try something different here with gospel bound this week, normally, I’m interviewed normally, or occasionally, somebody will interview me, but we’re just doing this solo this time, because I want to speak directly to you, to so many listeners and viewers that I’ve gotten to know over the years, and this is a significant time for this podcast, because this Podcast began right before that shutdown in 2020 and then really gained a lot of momentum as people turned to the internet and turned to podcasts for sources looking for news and information and encouragement during that really dark time across really the entire world. You know, I remember so much of that time vividly, and it’s these mundane moments that that stick out. I had really tremendously encouraging and challenging conversations with some well known guests that we’re going to talk about here. But I’m sure, like many of you, I had these ordinary, mundane conversations just in the backyard, just across the fence, with with my neighbors, and my next door neighbor at the time said that she just could not imagine. I don’t know if it was one week that she thought, or two weeks at the time, working from home with her kids out of school. And I sympathize with her so much. This was unexpected. This was major disruption. In fact, we ended up celebrating a birthday together for one of her children that Saturday. And it was really a last small slice of normalcy between before so much changed and again, some of it forever, but at this time and just in the backyard, I warned her that from everything I was seeing and all of my instincts and what I was reading, it would be a lot longer again those stadium lights would take quite a while to be able to turn on again. And the best early insights I got during that moment came from somebody who would eventually join gospel bound as a guest, and that was Andy Crouch. And Andy’s assessment was far more dire than a lot of others other people’s were at the time. And of course, he turned out to be very much correct in so much of what he said, and I’m grateful for, for how it prepared me, my family, the Gospel Coalition, in general, in my work there really made a big difference. And over the last three years, or actually, well, three years of kind of immediate dealing with COVID, and then five years since then, have led me to gravitate towards certain pundits, certain voices that I’ve learned to trust, especially those voices who push back against the increasing allure and against the grain of tribal incentives that have taken over so much of social media. People who are are zigging when everybody else is zagging, where you know that the incentive for them to go with the flow is so strong that they must be very convicted about going a different direction. Doesn’t mean they’re always right, but sometimes this is one of the best ways that you can you can learn of who to trust in this wild, wild west of the internet that can be so utterly confusing. Andy Crouch was one of those people, and I hope that over dozens and dozens and even hundreds of episodes of gospel bound that in some ways, I’ve been able to help introduce you to a number of people whose work, who’s writing, who’s thinking, who’s whose faith is is admirable, people that you can trust at a time when there is so much increased distrust, in part, in large part, in some ways, over what happened five years ago. And unlike so many other podcasts that boomed in the in the shutdown the lockdowns of 2020, it’s not the case that gospel bound started because of those shutdowns, I’m blessed to join off in Kevin De Young’s podcast, life and books and everything with our our good friend Justin Taylor. That was a podcast that did start because Kevin was typically speaking so much around the country and around the world. He didn’t have those engagements anymore, and so we turned to the podcast as a way of really talking primarily about what we were learning and comparing notes about the Coronavirus, but then it expanded into an interview program for him and engaging a lot of different topics between the two of us every every few years. But gospel bound did start just before the COVID lockdowns again from March 11, 2020, those first inclining, first, first potential days when we could see what was going to happen. And I’ll, I think back on, on that Friday, my son is now 10 years old. It’s amazing to think of of how much has changed in so many ways. But I knew, I mean, I didn’t know for sure at that time, but had a strong sense that my son, in his last year of preschool, would never go back, and indeed, has never been back with those group of friends and in that place ever again since then, things that would have been hard to take at that moment on that Friday, when everything was so up in the Air. But ultimately, we just, we just didn’t know, and this podcast was a place that I turned turn to be able to learn and to be able to share so much of what I’d learned during during that time with with COVID. Of course, you have to start with any remembrance, thinking about more than 1.2 million people who died, it’s a large number, no matter how you talk about it. Is it larger than expected? Smaller than we expected during the time? I don’t I don’t know. It’s a number. And these are people, our loved ones, our neighbors, our friends near and far, who are certainly deserving of our continued remembrance and mourning. Furthermore, it’s impossible really to imagine the scale of pain and disruption that was caused by this

Collin Hansen

really. The unprecedented pandemic, in terms of the the broader societal effects across the entire world, you think about people who’s who’s learning young, young children whose learning was lost forever, the dead, including from the Coronavirus or so many other things, who would would never be mourned by families who couldn’t even gather together for funerals the milestones, the graduations, the final sports seasons, the transitions of life that were never celebrated as a result of the shutdowns and of the pandemic. And when we look back on so much pain and disruption, we naturally have a lot of questions of why. Some of them for God, many of them for government authorities. And part of what’s so incredibly jarring about this experience five years later is that we still don’t have an explanation. We don’t know how this happened. We don’t have any account of what was any official account of what were the right decisions or the wrong decisions, or things like the lab leak theory that was castigated, even with significant consequences at the time, where a number of security officials have admitted is probably The most likely explanation for what happened in Wuhan China, but we don’t know that for sure, even now. Perhaps somebody does, but the public at large does not, and it’s part of this inability to be able to reckon as a culture with what we went through, what we endured separately and together, that has contributed to so much of our deepening cultural divide, and furthermore, a complete political realignment we’ve seen more broadly. I’ve said this to a number of people since then, but the best way to describe politics, at least in the United States now, is as a division between those who put their trust in credentials and those who are inclined more toward conspiracy. And I don’t say this to be able to indicate one side being correct and the other side being wrong. The fact is, there are many reasons, many valid reasons, for significant distrust over all the things that happened in 2020, and in the following years. And so even our very understanding of what constitutes a conspiracy theory has changed because our our very epistemology, our understanding of what we can trust and what we can know, has been affected dramatically by by these events that we were told in such very clear terms of exactly what was happening, despite the fact that many of these people who were so confident in front of a camera, really in private, would admit that they didn’t know what they were talking about. And that’s understandable, because this is not something with a clear parallel to some other experience. People didn’t know what they were dealing with at the time, but a lot of the concern and the conspiracy crept in when people had to acknowledge or had to pretend like or felt like they had to pretend like they did know what they were talking about, which is just not a fair explanation for the health experts and other scientists who were courageously dedicated and heroically engaging so many ways into this pursuit of of what this was and how we could be able to address it, individually and as a collective society at the same Time, while that leads to a lot of concerns about, why would God allow this? Why would he Why does this happen in a fallen world? What were the possible purposes that God could have ordained in this disaster that afflicted nearly the entire world? I still spend a lot of time thinking, and I hope you do as well about what did not happen with COVID 19, about what did not turn out to be the case. Again, we didn’t know what this was at the beginning. And did you ever experience something like this? My wife and I spent agonizing evenings on our screened porch, which, by the way, the weather at least across much of the South in 2020 was the most beautiful that that anyone that certainly we could, we could ever remember, was just absolutely remarkable. And we were spending so much time outside that that was a great blessing. We would sit late into the night on our screen porch just talking about, what would we do as a family? Where would we go? How would we respond, if in a worst case scenario, and it may not be easy to remember. The time, but all of those options were on the table. Anything was, everything was, was up for grabs. And of course, when you look back with 1.2 million dead, it was an absolutely terrible and dangerous thing. It was very bad, yet at the same time, we could see that if it could have been a whole lot worse, one of the areas that’s a significant departure from many earlier pandemics is thinking about the effects on children. And children were definitely affected, but not nearly as much as many of us feared, and not as much as in other pandemics where you expect children to be more adversely affected. That was not the case here, a decision that would have significant consequences when it would come to school shutdowns, of course, but it was reasonable to expect of how many children would be afflicted and affected by this, and thankfully, that was not primarily the case. So I often think about what did not happen but could have happened, and that’s one way I try to maintain a posture of thankfulness and faithfulness toward God, thinking about the evils that he forestalls, the evils that he prevents us from enduring. I also think about how the shutdown decisions were made at primarily state and local levels, thinking about things like schools and other institutions, instead of at the federal level. I don’t think a lot of us spend much time pondering that difference. But can you imagine in the United States, at least, this was the case in many other countries. But can you imagine in the United States, at least a top down decision, enforced by enforced by the law, enforced even by the military. Now it’s possible that in such a wide scale, universal shutdown, that some lives could have been saved. That’s certainly possible, but we saw from other countries that had more strict lockdowns, like Australia and China, that that when they would open up, they still had the spread of the disease, a disease that, of course, is still with us today. But I I simply cannot begin to wrap my mind around how much violence, protest, anger, frustration, fury would have been unleashed if different school districts and different counties and different cities were not allowed to make their own decisions based on the local health concerns, but also fundamentally political decisions about what that community was willing to tolerate or not tolerate. United States is a big place with many different kinds of people who have to coexist. And one of the blessings that I look back on, and I give thanks to God for, is how we didn’t have to make all those decisions in the same way. That’s a major blessing that I think sometimes we take for granted. Another thing though, that did not happen that I think a lot of us have overlooked. In fact, I mentioned this in a conversation with the New York Times, and it was something the reporter had never considered before, but it was the first time in in my memory, at least, where there was, and I think more broadly within American history, where there was no widespread turn or look to religious authorities.

Collin Hansen

Now it’s not as if there was no effort to try to to find explanations or comfort or assurance that was certainly provided it was sort of a high priestly function, but that was provided by the scientists, the scientists in those daily briefings who stood next to President Trump, and he looked into the cameras and told us what was going on, how it was going to be okay, and kind of assured us of what to do. They were performing that kind of intercessory function in there and offering that priestly comfort. But there was no turn toward toward religion. There was a call for prayer that first Sunday, March, 15. But I don’t know how many of us remember that President Trump had called for that prayer. There was so much scrambling to be able to be doing live stream, something that some larger churches, more technologically advanced churches, had already been doing, but the vast majority of churches had no experience with, let alone pastors who were accustomed to preaching and teaching into a camera. That was not a comfortable or or easy experience. It’s still not one. Today, pastors do not prefer. Her to do that for a whole a whole host of reasons, but there was no widespread pursuit of an explanation on religious grounds. In some ways, the pandemic revealed how deeply secular Western culture, including American culture, had already become. This is partially also because of a revealing of what many of us had assumed but possibly overlooked about the importance and the the significance of the assembly in religion, and certainly in Christianity in our churches. So part of the the disconnect between what we were experiencing in religion was because, by definition, with a pandemic and with these shutdowns, we could not meet together. This is why others, including Andy Crouch, have described this as the biggest disruption for the church since the Black Death of the 14th century. Thankfully, nothing close to the percentage of people who were killed, but in terms of the length and the severity of these shutdowns and of separation, it’s comparable, and you can think about all sorts of wars and rumors of wars and tribulations over these years, but they wouldn’t stop the church from assembling. But that’s what happened, not just for a short period, not just for two weeks to flatten the curve, but for an extended period of time for for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months on end for churches all over all over the place, and once again, created so much of that conflict because no one was on the same page, even within churches, even within pastoral staffs or groups of elders about when or under what conditions they were able to come back. There was no playbook for how any of this was supposed to go. Nobody had understood how this was supposed to play out. Nobody had prepared for it, and a lot of relationships and a lot of churches were were changed, at least for the foreseeable future because of the events that began to unfold five years five years ago today, I think back to some things that that we tried to do at the gospel Coalition. We immediately pivoted with recommendations for how churches could get up to speed quickly on live streaming, our traffic doubled immediately as churches were scrambling to understand and to and to process so much of this. Eventually, I would end up partnering with my with my friend Jonathan Lehman, was the president of nine marks, as well as our publisher, crossway, to produce a book called rediscover church, why the body of Christ is essential. And given the global nature of this, I’m so proud of how the gospel coalition and nine marks and crossway came together to simultaneously and immediately publish that book in 20 different languages, a remarkable effort involving so many different people. But this was among my greatest fears at the time, that people would forsake the assembly, that they would think that this, this could be a new normal for us with with live stream church, and that the assembly itself would not, would not, would not be important anymore. I’m happy to say that I don’t think that has been the case at all in the aftermath. Oddly enough, I am not nearly as optimistic about the effects on religion as an unlikely source, specifically, not just religion, but Christianity in particular, and that source is the New York Times, March 4, 2025 so a five year anniversary assessment of all sorts of different changes in American culture since COVID 19 and the shutdown and I need to read this to you. This is absolutely fascinating to see the New York Times arguing on March 4, 2025 that COVID 19 and these shutdowns may have halted the years long decline of Christianity in America. Let me read this for you. Quote the histories of pandemic suggested this one might produce a spiritual revival too. And along with the burst of woo, woo self care Americans started reporting a strengthening of their faith. It might have helped that early on, many church goers felt singled out and demeaned by restrictions on social gatherings. Boy, isn’t that interesting. Simultaneously, we might look back on COVID 19 as the high point of secularism in Western culture, and perhaps the United States in particular. And we might look back as it being the beginning of a return to faith. You may have seen recent polling. That showed that the decline of Christianity, this is what they’re probably referring to. Here is a slowdown of and really a plateauing of that decrease in Christianity. I think what they’re getting that there with churchgoers feeling singled out in demeaned by restrictions on social on social gatherings, that’s in part of how politicized these dynamics would become, and the way that people would would rally to church as a way of defying a lot of what they saw to be the overreach of the government. And I think very much they’re very much correct about a lot of that overreach, and the way that it singled out, as the New York Times just pointed out there really singled out churches compared to different groups. Let me just jump to that. I’ll take one example of what the New York Times could be talking about here. It strikes me. I mean, my church, we met outside in a parking deck. I remember all the way until the next Easter, we were still meeting outside. And remember that because it was so so warm and hot and I got sunburned, it was, it was a memorable experience there, that next, next Easter. But in Washington, DC, the District of Columbia, churches were not even allowed to meet outside, even with so called social distancing. I think this is a major reason why so much of COVID cannot be remembered merely by what happened March 11, 2020, but what happened with the death of George Floyd on May 25 2020, so much changed there, and it’s really hard to imagine this widespread feeling of racial Reckoning and then the subsequent massive backlash to that reckoning, apart from what people had experienced with pent up frustration and fears from The pandemic and from the lockdown. So in our memory, these these two events, they they go together. Both of them among the most significant of our lifetime, the biggest protest movement since civil rights in Vietnam, in American culture, after George, George Floyd’s death, and then COVID 19 as well. But there’s just no way to separate the two. The one followed the other. And one of the reasons that churches felt singled out in places like Washington DC is because public health officials were saying will allow you to go to that protest march outside with 1000s, even 10s of 1000s of other people, but will not allow you to gather outside with your church. It was a prominent church in Washington, DC, that sued successfully because of this double standard there, but it’s possible that through all of that recognition and defense of the the ability of God’s people to be able to meet that could have led to an increased priority on church and and a realization of the significance of religion and Christianity in particular. I mean, that’s a lot of what we would expect, as the writer is pointing out here with the history of pandemics, where they bring us and they helped us to confront, as my wife did on what my wife and I did on that screen porch to confront our morality our mortality, that’s absolutely what you would often expect, but it might have been one of those moments that punctured that imminent frame that the philosopher Charles Taylor describes of secular culture.

Collin Hansen

Well, you know that on gospel bound, we are all about puncturing that imminent frame. We’re all about searching for evidence of faith of God at work around the world. And we saw this in the early days on this podcast around COVID 19, the first three guests that I had on three of the most insightful people that I know on religion and theology and church and culture and history. That would be Ross Douthat, who this made another appearance this year on gospel bound for his new book believe. Tom Holland, absolutely one of the most effective cultural apologist working today with his rest is history podcast. And then the Australian writer and pastor, Mark Mark Sayers, those were already planned interviews that already recorded and then aired leading up to and then through this shutdown beginning on March 11, 2020, then Eric Larson, one of my favorite narrative nonfiction. Fiction writers, one of the most accomplished in the world. He would join later to talk about his book about Churchill and the Blitz. Once again, he’s doing a lot of podcasts because he’s not doing a book tour with COVID 19, but given the crisis nature of what he wrote about of Churchill’s Wartime. Leadership was natural for him to ask a lot of questions about leadership in turbulent times. Then I turned to John Lennox from Oxford, England. And then John Piper, who many of us know and love as an American pastor. And those episodes, John Lennox, 117,000 downloads. John Piper, 130,000 downloads are still among the top 10 most listened to episodes of gospel bound of all time, and no wonder, because they offered such great insight, not because of things that necessarily learned during COVID, but because of the theological truths that has sustained them over a lifetime of faithful pursuit of Christ and of ministry and goodness. Have we needed? Needed that insight, needed that encouragement, needed that perspective from the Lord. Because, as I have talked with pastors, especially in church theaters, more broadly, over these last five years, there has been no more difficult issue relating to pastoral ministry. I’ll often make this observation, and it strikes people immediately that this is the first example I’ve ever seen where people literally wore their politics into church and everyday life on their face, because masks themselves had become such a Flashpoint, culturally and politically and otherwise, inside and outside the church, this was not an easy situation for us to navigate. At the gospel coalition, there were many things that we never took a stance on, things like whether you should get the vaccine. We never even took a stance on whether you should wear masks. People have been very upset at us on both sides because of us not taking a stance. The one stance we took on masks was asking both groups to bear with one another in love and unity. And I am, I’m glad, I’m glad that we took that stance then, and I think it’s a message that’s still needed today. We could look back on many things. We look back on the just the laughable recommendations we got for cloth masks, even though the people making those recommendations knew that they were not effective in being able to halt transmission of COVID 19. We can look back and we can see a number of lessons learned, but in general, it’s always a smart idea to bear with one another, especially brothers and sisters in Christ in love during a difficult situation that many of us are scrambling to try to figure out. And as we pointed out in that masks article, this works both ways, because wherever you came down on things related to COVID 19, there’s probably a good chance, looking back five years later, that you were wrong about something, you were right about some things, and you were wrong about other things. I think it’s the better part of humility and love to be able to see to look back on that. And I hope we could learn some lessons going forward of the way that we would bear with one another and try not to expect too much of each other when we’re trying to work through difficult environments, especially something that’s not in our confessional statement. It’s not something that we’re bound in a church covenant. You know about masks, or exactly the nature of the assembly, and yet those are the exact things that that divided so many of us and led to a very unfortunate rise of people who who try, through their online ministries to divide us. And so I’m glad we took that stance five years ago, and I think it’s one that’s just as needed today. I want to I want to end with just looking back on some of my own predictions. I wonder if you ever sat down in 2020 or 2021, and thought about your own life, or about our broader culture, our broader society, even the world, of of what would change and what would be and what would not be different. I mean, I just think back now on how there are a lot of people pushing everyone to go back to work full time in an office, but it seems unlikely that everybody is going to do that. So remote, remote work is a much bigger part of our lives. Now we’ve seen how education does not work well, especially for youth in an online only environment. I’ve only increased my my my views on the value of in person education, which certainly has overlap within the church, and the value of the the in person assembly at the same time with everybody learning how to use things like zoom. That’s why at the gospel coalition, we jumped in on things like online learning cohorts, because they’re a great way to plug the gap. Um. They’re not full blown, full time degree producing or degree awarding education. I don’t think they would be a good substitute for that, but they are good ways to learn with so many other different brothers and sisters in Christ from around the world and from the best teachers in an interactive environment. I don’t think we ever would have thought about doing those cohorts, apart from the experience that we all went through in in COVID 19. But as I wrap up this retrospective of five years later, I thought it would be valuable to go back and look at something that I published in April. Can you believe this? In April of 2020 there were so many different people from March 11 and the immediate aftermath who wanted to know what my thoughts were. I published this on April 2 2020 now I think I carefully made sure that I did not publish it on April 1 of 2020 but I offered five predictions for the COVID 19 aftermath, and so I want to run through these predictions in the interest of transparency, humility, and I hope not humiliation, as we look back and on really, really scary times, but also times where we can see the Lord’s Providence continued to carry us through many trials and tribulations. And so in my five predictions on the COVID 19 aftermath, I created these in seemingly contradictory pairs, with the sense that we weren’t going to go back to the world of November 2019 but the world would also still be recognizable in many different ways. And so the first prediction I offered for the COVID 19, aftermath, April 2, 2020, just a few weeks into the pandemic, is that we will lose trust, even as we gain solidarity. No doubt, the decline of trust and institutional authorities long predated COVID 19, but COVID 19 was a substantial accelerator and a breakdown of trust. I just mentioned how that trust had been breaking down in the church, no doubt toward hospitals, doctors, health care officials, many of whom resigned in the aftermath, just not wanting to deal with the kind of disrespect and hostility that they faced in hospitals and clinics. But what I wrote back in 2020 was that going forward, the richest and poorest alike will look with jaundiced eyes and authorities, at least those responsible for the initial response and new more trustworthy authorities will emerge. I am not sure that new, more trustworthy authorities have emerged, but one thing I’ll ask the students in my classes about is, why do people like me on these podcasts? How have we become the authorities? There’s an instinctive trust of of these voices on the internet, especially when they’re not tied to institutions. So yes, an ongoing significant decline in trust of institutions. And this raises the question of what would happen if we were asked to shut down again,

Collin Hansen

I don’t think there would be even the levels of credibility that there were at the time to lead to that shutdown. So we’re all kind of in this together. We have a solidarity that we’re that we all feel a common distrust toward institutions. This is a major challenge for church leaders still today. Second one is will depend on the virtual, as we love the local. I mentioned, a burst of enthusiasm for embodied community and worship would help this, this trend when we finally gather again. You know, I I’m really happy to say this. I did not see this coming. In fact, I mentioned something here that I was totally wrong about. I wrote that if the quarantine ends this summer, smaller local churches may feel like safer alternatives and mega churches that attract many visitors and commuters. I don’t think that’s been the case at all in terms of smaller churches or bigger churches, bigger churches were easier to pivot, in a lot of cases, toward the live stream. I think a lot of larger churches recognize the importance of community. So we’re not seeing this a huge push toward virtual everything that I was expecting. I was expecting things like the metaverse. That’s the kind of stuff that I thought was going to begin to take over in light of this, and just have not seen those efforts take off, thankfully. And in fact, in many ways, in my own church, which doesn’t even do a live stream, and is a mega church, I see just as much enthusiasm. More enthusiasm today for gathering in person, for gathering in person, in small groups, and the overall church. I’m very encouraged by this. I do need to clarify, though, that this is not the case in all church environments, different political environments, theological environments, ethnic environments. That may not be the case, but I’m just describing what I’ve seen in my experience, in talking with a number of other church leaders. All right. Number three, I said, we’ll gain global perspective with national protections. I wrote in here that perhaps never again in our lifetime, will we enjoy such ease of travel inside and especially outside national borders. I think I was probably mostly wrong about that. Travel has been just setting records. In fact, so many people had things pent up from 2020 then I know my local airport is setting new records for travel every single month that’s domestic, that’s also international. So that’s not been the case. However, it is the case that there’s a lot less trust between countries. That’s definitely in the mood in the United States, you see that all over the place, in our politics, you see that in our economics now our military approach, there’s definitely less of a kind of a warm or welcoming attitude toward globalism or internationalism that is definitely on the wane, and there are going to be some significant consequences to that, for a lot of the reasons that that are very obvious to us now, with wars and with economics and and prices, of things, inflation, all sorts of different stuff, stuff there, but it’s definitely the case. So I don’t think the travel is necessarily the concern here related to global health, but I do think it’s more the case that we we don’t trust people who are different from us, that that has, that has decreased. Okay, so just a couple more. Here we I wrote that we’ll see spiritual hunger with naturalistic hopes. I think this is probably levels of anxiety. I don’t think are primarily attributable to the higher levels of anxiety, primarily attributable to COVID 19, but it hasn’t helped. This is what I wrote back in 2020. We will never lose this sense of exposure. We’ll never quite shake the trauma of uncertainty or settle into safety. Not even a vaccine will make that feeling come back completely. So we’re left with many spiritual and practical questions, what happens when I die? Why am I so anxious and afraid? Who will take care of me? Normally, in crisis, we gather for assurance and ritual meetings, especially religious ones, which confer shared meaning and purpose. But the Coronavirus has pushed religion even further to the margins of the private family at home when COVID 19 has been defeated. Will we credit God? We rejoice instead in our medical saviors, or we return to temporal distractions upon their eventual exuberant return? I think I can answer my own questions there saying I don’t think there was a widespread crediting of God. I don’t definitely don’t think there was rejoicing in our medical saviors. All the debates over the vaccine vaccines have made that made that moot. I think it’s definitely the case that we return to temporal distractions upon their return. That’s, I think, the the dominant mode there. So there’s an ache inside of us, an anxiety that we don’t know how to cope with. And maybe there is, based on the New York Times article, more of that appetite. Just find that in the church, find that in the gospel of Jesus Christ, I’m not sure, but definitely our primary competition there are the many, many, many distractions, including those digital distractions that kept us occupied during the shutdown itself. And finally, I wrote here in 2020 April 2, we’ll draw closer to families with fewer members. Bottom line here is the thought that in a more precarious world with significant economic downturns and kind of spikes up and down? Would it make people less willing to have children? And I don’t know. I mean, just personally, we have a third child who probably is with us because of the pandemic and the time that our that we all spent together at home. That’s one of those positive things that I see. Looking back on this there’s so much negative, but how many people’s stories have been changed for the better? It’s always what you see with God’s providence, even in the midst of the worst hardship, you’ll see so much bad in this fall. World, and yet, always these glimmers of hope. But generally, I think it’s true that the nuclear family in the home have become more important. Home prices have skyrocketed. They’ve become that, that Fortress of Solitude. They’ve become that, that refuge. But also Yeah, still with smaller people, there’s a lot of broader cultural reluctance toward Bigger, bigger families, and with a lot of uncertainties about children. So I think I was probably right on that one. So just concluding there with my assessment and bit of humility and humiliation on five predictions for the COVID 19 aftermath now revisited from April 2, 2020 Well, I closed that message in 2020 with a way that I want to close here again today. If God can work good from the cross of Jesus, he can work good from COVID 19, only God can make known to us the path of life. Only in his presence do we find fullness of joy. At his right hand are pleasures forevermore, nothing, not even COVID 19 can rob us of that promise. Through union with Christ, whatever our God ordains is right, and someday, thanks to Jesus, we’ll even understand how well as the host of gospel bound. Thank you for for being with me these five years. Hopefully, by God’s grace, we’ll have many more years to come, and I hope that this will help you to reflect on the ways that God’s providence and care for you has shown, even through the tremendous difficulties we all endured together and separately, through COVID. 19, thanks, everyone.