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Here goes: the best times are those during which everything is falling apart. We have two approaches we can take when confronted with such a circumstance. One is secular. The other is spiritual.
William Butler Yeats takes the former approach. In what is perhaps his most renowned poem (and one most students of literature know well), he wrote… “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
As an avid reader and lover of the written word poetry, essays and fiction, I find Yeats’ masterpiece The Second Coming as beautiful and poignant as anything written. But it’s dark with a capital “D,” a downer of a poem if ever there was one and not something to read when you’re in a bad head space. (In my opinion it’s more frightening than anything Edgar Allen Poe came up with–or Stephen King, for that matter.)
Speaking of King (and just bear with me while I make what is, at best, only a tangential connection), another prolific writer with “King” in his name took a different approach.
That would be King David. It’s hard to pin down exactly when he wrote many of his Psalms, or under what circumstances he did so, but his poetry is not like W.B. Yeats’.
Even the darkness is not dark to You;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you. (Psalm 139:12)
But that I chose to see crises as King David did is just part of the reason I embrace crises. It’s not just the peace granted to me, as a follower of Jesus, indwelt with his spirit. It’s watching people of God, men and women I respect and deeply cherish, unite around a common cause: there’s danger at the gates of our city, and we man the battlements together to beat it back.
It happened in 2020, when dozens of us spent day after day locked into a conference room trying to figure out how in the world we were going to keep our campus safe from an out-of-control pandemic.
It happened when a winter storm was bearing down on South Carolina a few years ago, threatening to bury us in snow and ice and the potential of days without electricity. And it happened again last fall, during Hurricane Helene. Just like the pandemic, it was a truly unprecedented event. And, just like every other moment when the Anderson University Emergency Response Team mobilizes, the hand of God was upon us in a powerful, supernatural way. There’s no way to explain it otherwise.
Don’t believe me? Just read this month’s cover story. Read our feature on Charlie Dickerson, the poster boy for unsung heros at AU (and, no, hero is not too strong a word to describe Charlie). Read our stories about how Dr. Tracy Jessup and others mobilized AU students to roll up their sleeves and get to work being the hands and feet of Jesus. I wish I had the space to mention every person who played a role.
Please hear me: dealing with these issues isn’t fun; they aren’t to be made light of. I can attest that, as someone who helps lead the University’s public relations efforts, most of what we deal with are not life-and-death situations. Anderson University is incredibly blessed in that regard.
But I’ve learned in my nearly eight years of service to AU that crises do happen. And in every circumstance, God’s favor is unambiguous.
Returning to the words of King David, in Psalm 37:25 he wrote “…I have not seen the righteous forsaken nor his children begging for bread.” Keep in mind that at the time David wrote those words, he was an old man. He’d suffered the highest highs and the lowest lows (including, coincidentally, the time he had to literally steal (but not beg for) bread to feed his soldiers.) So, even late in his life, David still recognized the favor of God Almighty and rested in that realization.
That’s what I hope this magazine will help you realize: that we have God’s favor. Despite the darkness, and
even as we bask in the light, we should always be mindful that “He alone is our refuge and strength,” in good times and bad.