I dropped me cell phone again and this time I really, really shattered the screen. The kind of shattering that makes the display all funky, and bits of glass fall off. It started making random calls to clients, my mother, my wife, and who knows who else. I had to shut it down.

This was the second time in a month, I have cracked this phone's screen. The first time I had it repaired locally, and was without it for what seemed like years, but two or three days. It was never right after that, but it was ok. I compare it to a closed head injury. Things are never really right after a closed head injury. I just couldn't do speakerphone any more.

Now, I have been without my phone for two days. And that is pathetic.

Not that I have been without my phone but I need it so much. I walk by the phone on the counter and feel sadness—not for the phone but from being disconnected from the world through the phone.

These devices entered my life after we moved to Abilene in 1993.

Before that, I spent three hours on the road making hospital visits in Amarillo and occasionally checked in to see if anyone else had come the hospital since I had left. It was a simpler time. I could pray and sing, and be quiet.

I remember as the boys were getting on to middle school, I told the secretaries at the church that if my children or wife called, to put them through no matter what I was doing or who I was talking to. It was one of my finer moments as a husband and parent. You see, pastor's wives and children often find themselves pushed away when the church gathers because someone has to speak to the pastor with some urgent matter. So pastor's wives and children can feel a lack of significance especially when compared to others in the congregation. Sadly, tragically, it also happens to children of missionaries. I saw that several times after we moved to Abilene, and each time, it grieved me.

When we moved to Abilene, the guys were getting older, Anna went to work, and I became the chauffeur dropping off and picking up the guys at the end of the day. Life in Abilene was busier, and Anna and I were taking classes at HSU for our counseling degrees, so life was complicated. So first I got a pager, and then a voice pager, and then a clunky Motorola cell phone so I was available to the family but especially the guys. I pretty well had Anna nailed down to a desk, so keeping up with her wasn't much trouble, but the guys, well, sometimes they needed me and I was on the 8^th floor at Hendrick Medical Center visiting someone. If my pager went off in a patient's room, they just thought I was really, really in demand, but not necessarily in the way they imagined. The guys needed a ride.

The guys grew up, stopped calling for a ride, got on with their lives as they had been encouraged to do, and the clunky cell phone got smaller and smaller and harder and harder to keep up with. I don't exactly remember when the phone became a necessary appendage to my body. It wasn't in Abilene, because the technology was still pretty new and no one in the church had my cell phone number. I could do some incredibly stupid things, but putting out my cell number was not one of them. It wasn't when I ran the Mental Health Department at Polunsky because only the Wardens could carry cells on their persons.

So, I guess it happened ever so slightly after the summer of 2014 when I grew, unknowingly, another appendage which hard wired me to a phone and then a “smart” phone. It was like a rash that over time sneaks up on you. I have lost count of how many “smart” phones I have had, but I know exactly how many I have broken by cracking the face. I am seriously thinking of making a case which surrounds this phone in bubble wrap. It may look a little funny in my pocket, but if it works. . . . .

For many of us, we realize we have never been in this unique place before.

The pandemic with the COVID-19 is real no matter how much we want to believe it is “just another flu" which comes around once a year and lasts about six months. We only have to look outside of our protective wall and the drum beat of our favorite “news” source to see the response of the world, not just the USA, to know something is different—terribly different about the COVID-19. It is more, much more than our normal issues with the flu. For one, we usually have a vaccine for what we believe will be the strain of the year. We have nothing for this. More than that, measures have to be extreme to contain and “flatten the curve.” Deaths always occur with the seasonal flu but this is more than that. It is not a political issue, it is a life issue.

I have never seen a response like this to the “flu.” And I have seen “many summers.” In fact, I have never experienced anything like this before in my life. I do remember the polio epidemic of 1952, because it was the polio vaccine of 1955 that caused my mother and dad to make sure we were vaccinated. I remember the shot. I remember the spot it left on my arm. I remember thin threads of the fear. But this is nothing like that, because, we do not have a vaccine and efforts to stop the spread will be catastrophic to countries, economies, and culture. It is not political, fear mongering, it is real.

I had the opportunity to visit with one of our church ministers today by video about what the future holds for church attendance once this blight has passed over our world and time. I mentioned as a church going, retired pastor, I cannot appreciate “online worship” as anything but a pale substitute of the real gathering of believers. I believe it is significant that God would use this time to teach us the meaning of community in the body of Christ. I have often used the metaphor of “it's like kissing your sister.” Not that I would know that, because the Chancellors are families of boys(mostly) but I can imagine what that would feel like. Online worship feels like that to me.

I miss congregational worship.

I miss the gathering of believers.

I miss the congregational singing.

I miss the communal listening that betrays a people hungry for the Word of God.

I miss the “amens” and the lifted hands, the congregational powerful listening and the rituals that I have associated with worship for all the years I can remember.

So I shared my uninformed opinion that God's people would pack out services and sing joyfully, and listen prayerfully, and respond open-heartedly once the “all clear” is sounded.

What I do believe is that social attenders, those folks who believe that attendance is “good business” might lose the impulse to go to church, but I am not sure that will be a terrible loss. It will be a separating if you will, of the “sheep and the goats.”

I do believe that separation will make the heart grow fonder and precipitate a yearning for that fellowship unique to serious worship. Church history shows that to be true. And we will see that proved true in our time.

What believers need to do in these days is pray, pray as we have not done since before 1904 when God last moved in power and might across a nation changing forever its trajectory. We need to pray. As we worship online, we also need to stay close to the promise of II Chronicles 7:14 close in our prayers and our heart, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”(II Chronicles 7:14 New International Version)

We can be tempted to worry or to be afraid, but God guides us to be secure in Him, confident of Him, knowing that everything at every moment is guided by Him so--we do not have to live in fear.

I am not surprised we have come to this moment in our national life.

People are dying now because they did not know the truth about COVID-19. Some weeks ago I was at a gathering where one of the young men present said, “Chill out, this is just the flu.” There was no point in arguing with him, however, that lack of knowledge could come back to hurt him and his family deeply. I hope not but we will only know this in a couple of months if then.

The problem is that collectively, we struggle with the truth. Over the last few years, we have seen the notion of “my/your truth” bubble up. In past generations we have generally understood this phrase to be ranked in the category of your/my opinion or your understanding of yourself, your relationships, or your world. However, we never recognized it as “truth.”

It is the irony of ironies before you can offer testimony in a court of law, the witness is sworn in. The oath they take is something like “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God,” or perhaps “so help you.” Then, what happens next is two different attorneys elicit, contradict, massage, distort or otherwise attempt to obfuscate or shape the truth in a way that benefits their client.

So why is this business of the truth important now? With a world of choices regarding who we trust to tell the truth, that trust can be dangerously misplaced. People must exercise due diligence in holding a certain skepticism toward voices which are markedly different from the rest of the voices speaking into our lives. We abdicate our responsibility to measure what is heard against the truth at our own and our family's peril. For the larger part of my life(near universal pre-collaspe of communism) I believed my government would largely be honest with it's citizens and the world(I was wrong). I believed the propaganda coming from communist leaders and states were largely telling their people what they wanted them to know and what they wanted the world to hear. Those were simple days of great naivete.

I believed this day would come, this moment destined to present itself. A moment in time where it is imperative we hold out the requirement that news and media outlets, government leaders, scientists and medical practitioners speak the truth, share the facts, be transparently honest with a nation of people who need to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

We should accept nothing less or expect nothing more.