Pandemic Tip #2

March 19, 2020

When I was growing up, I loved the nursery rhymes and children’s stories. When I grew older, I discovered that the original stories were meant to teach children (and parents) basic “common wisdom” lessons. Like Aesop’s Fables, only the “moral of the story” was left for the reader to figure out.

One such story is “Chicken Little.” The story I heard was the King solved Chicken Little’s problem at the end by giving her an umbrella so the falling acorns would not be a problem. However, this story has a very long and dark past.

The earliest recorded versions of the story had Chicken Little and the rest of her friends (all of them birds) meeting a fox and mindlessly going to the fox’s den, where they never came out. Some have declared the moral of the story is “don’t believe everything you hear.” While that might be part of the message of the story, I think there is also another point. Simply put, “don’t panic.” Basically panic created a situation where an event was interpreted in such a way that reason was lost. Once the emotional panic set in, it became a disease that spread to the other animals. It ended in a fox taking advantage of the panicked birds.

The line that maybe be the best known line in the story is “the sky is falling.” It comes from the version published in 1850. Students of history will recognize that the world was coming off, and in the middle of sicknesses that included Yellow fever, Influenza, and Cholera that did a lot of damage as far as death and fear was concerned.

Jesus warned us about worry when He said, “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” [Matthew 6:24 NLT] Do you see it? What Jesus is saying is that when we worry we are thinking about things that may never happen. Energy is spent in “panic mode.” Once panic mode hits, we forget the things we have to deal with today. My suspicion is that once we start into panic mode; we essentially create the thing we fear BECAUSE we are not paying attention to what is important today.

I believe there is good news. Jesus gives peace. “I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don’t be troubled or afraid.” [Jesus, from John 14:27 NLT] I think the old meme is correct, “Know Jesus, know peace. No Jesus, no peace.”

So while attention is diverted to “am I going to have enough toilet paper tomorrow,” we are missing the real question. The real question you need to ask yourself, “am I on the path to heaven today?”