Washing My Hands and Checking on My Neighbor in the Name of Jesus

I like to listen to sports-talk in the car. But they don’t have anything to talk about these days.

In case you hadn’t heard, sports is canceled in America. When an NBA player was tested positive Wednesday for Covid-19 (the disease caused by the coronavirus), the NBA suspended play for at least the next month, the NCAA cancelled their popular “March Madness” basketball tournament, the major leagues cancelled the rest of spring season games, and colleges canceled all spring sports.

And as you know, it’s not just sports. Ohio Governor Dewine has ordered that most gatherings of more than 100 are banned. This means that most churches are shuttered this Sunday (PPC is live-streaming to an empty house).

And people are anxious. People are hoarding items like toilet paper and hand sanitizer. We are afraid to go out in public. No one is quite sure what to do or how to react.

For many, including health experts, it’s like watching a train-wreck in slow motion. Will the US end up like Italy, where the number of Covid-19 cases has reached such drastic proportions that health care workers must make awful triage choices that usually present themselves only in wartime?  

The other response we’re seeing in the public is the shrinking number of people who blow this off as one massive over-reaction. After all, most of the people who contract Covid-19 have mild cases with symptoms no more serious than the flu (this is true). We don’t freak out about the number of people who die each year from the flu. What’s the worry?

As I am writing this, we are having a discussion in the PPC offices about what message to put on our LED sign out front. We finally landed on “Keep calm and wash your hands.” Not very spiritual, I know. It’s not “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” but it’s what people need to know right now. Keep calm and wash your hands.

Actually, washing your hands is, in these precarious times, a kind of neighbor-love.

Self-interest will make me wash my hands more often these days; I don’t want to get sick. But neighbor-love will prompt me to be even more careful about hygiene because I want to protect others.

As a man, I have seen a wide variety of hand-washing techniques in public restrooms, all the way from walking past the sink without a sideways glance to fluttering the fingers, sans soap, in the running water as if it were some sort of casual ritual to the kind of thorough hand-washing health officials have always advised (the latter, sadly, rarely seen in public restrooms).

My mother taught me right, and I always wash my hands before I leave the restroom. That’s simple hygiene, mostly driven by self-interest.

But it is neighbor-love that will prompt me to be extra thorough and careful about hygiene, not just because I want to protect my loved ones but because I want to protect the people they will come into contact with, people who might be weaker and more vulnerable to the illness. I want to do my part to help “flatten the curve” of the epidemic, spreading out the epidemic over time so that our healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases.

That’s right. I wash my hands to protect people I’ll never meet.

Jesus said that neighbor-love is important. Love of neighbor is the second greatest of all the commandments, second only to love for God.

So, yes, wash your hands.

Wash them thoroughly.

And do all this in Jesus’s name, praying as you scrub for all the people who will be devastated – both medically and economically – by this plague. 

Then, with your hands thoroughly cleaned and your heart full of gratitude to God for His grace and sovereign care (He’s got this!), check on your elderly neighbor. See if she needs you to run to the store for toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

As Marvin Olasky has written in his article “Be a Good Neighbor: Love in the Time of Coronavirus,” this crisis gives believers an opportunity to pay forward the grace we’ve been shown in Christ:

We should not be so concerned about our own health that we’re afraid to be neighbors. Pay attention to the needs of the elderly…. How we react to a crisis like this shows whether we are new creations—and the whole world is watching.

If we merely hunker down, that is Satan’s triumph. We always need to show God’s love. That’s especially true in the time of coronavirus.

So let’s be the people who keep calm. And wash our hands. And check on our neighbors.

All in the name of Jesus.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor