Update from Lud and Mur, March, ’20

March 19th, 2020

Mur and I are closeted in our home for the next two weeks at least. We were able to get our trip South in without incident. We saw almost all in our family’s southern contingent. What a blessing to see 5 of our 7 great grand-kids, and especially to witness Miles and Silas’s baptism. The next generation is off to a great start spiritually! Our time at the National Religious Broadcaster’s convention in Nashville provided good times with friends and connections for the radio ministry. Thanks for your prayers. I talked to the Director of a Spanish radio Network who shared: “Your program is wonderful! At the time your program is on people enjoy listening to your solid Bible teaching. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for all you do. Keep doing it until the Lord returns.” Our program is now carried on a new station, Heartfelt Radio, 91.9 FM,WKJA, Barberton, OH at about 5:40-50 in the morning. See if you can pick it up.
Since returning home we’ve been hit, as you have, with wave after wave of news concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Presently we are doing well and trying to follow the guidelines our government has prescribed. We’ve found comfort in the words of Psalm 5:3, 11-12 and 57:1. By the way, Lud’s eye surgery and healing has gone very well. Thanks for praying
The other day our grandson Caleb’s wife, Hannah Wilson, shared the following quote over facebook which provides wise counsel during times like we’re in:
It’s now clear that COVID-19 is a deadly serious global pandemic, and all necessary precautions should be taken. Still, C. S. Lewis’s words—written 72 years ago—ring with some relevance for us. Just replace “atomic bomb” with “coronavirus.” In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds. — “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
Over the next month you might have time to do some reading. If you haven’t been following the study of Romans that I’m doing over the radio you might want to go to the archives and read what we have covered so far this year in this study. I hope some of you will find this study helpful.