They went rafting for 25 days and came back to coronavirus: How to face the future in faith

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They went rafting for 25 days and came back to coronavirus: How to face the future in faith

Stock photo: Rafting in the Grand Canyon

On February 19, Zach Edler and more than a dozen other people set out on a twenty-five-day adventure: rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

When they left, Bernie Sanders had a double-digit lead heading into that night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Cases of coronavirus were showing signs of decline in mainland China. 

On March 14, when they pulled their rafts out of the river, a man who worked for a rafting company asked them, “Have you been in contact with the outside world?”  

They had not.  

Except for a few one-way text messages sent to their families on a satellite phone, they had not heard anything in more than three weeks. No cell service or news. Not even a passing word from fellow travelers. 

Then the man told them what they didn’t know: coronavirus had exploded in the US and around the world. Italy was under lockdown; the stock market was plummeting; professional sports were suspended; many schools were closed. Tom Hanks had the virus. 

‘How’d we go from paradise to hoarding rice and beans?’ 

“Half of us thought he was joking,” Edler said. “It’s like, here’s an old river guide pulling our leg. I mean, I’ve heard some pretty big tales out on the river.” 

However, as a nurse named Sarah Knaack said, “I think the girls believed it right away. He said it in this real ominous way but then he just walked away to see about lunch and we were left nervously joking with ourselves totally unsure what was going on.” 

The group packed up their rafts and gear and drove out. Ninety minutes later, they picked up a cell signal and the texts poured in. “It was this feeling of disbelief,” Ms. Knaack said. “It’s like, ‘How’d we go from paradise to hoarding rice and beans?’” 

Another rafter searched Amazon on her phone for toilet paper and saw it wasn’t…

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Gov’t Closure of Churches During COVID-19 Is Legal if Temporary, Group Says

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Gov’t Closure of Churches During COVID-19 Is Legal if Temporary, Group Says


Gov’t Closure of Churches During COVID-19 Is Legal if Temporary, Group Says

Government restrictions on churches during the COVID-19 pandemic are almost certainly legal provided they are temporary and don’t target congregations, according to a new memo by a leading defender of religious liberty.

First Liberty Institute issued its guidance this week on “Churches and Religious Institutions Facing Coronavirus Restrictions on Gathering,” asserting that churches should continue to serve their local communities but do so while following government guidelines. 

“Church and state have an opportunity to work together to reduce the impact of the virus on our communities while encouraging calm and preserving liberty,” the memo says. 

Restrictions on churches are likely constitutional as long as they are “temporary” and “evenly applied” to other large gatherings, the memo says.

“Government may not substantially burden the free exercise of religion unless it has a compelling reason for doing so, and even then, it must use the least burdensome approach that achieves that compelling interest,” it says. “Temporary action to reduce the spread of a global pandemic is almost certainly a compelling reason, so long as the government is not treating religious institutions unfairly compared with how it treats other comparable gatherings.

“For instance,” the memo says, “if state officials require churches to ensure that each service has no more than…

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Lecrae Conducts Homeless Outreach & Releases New Single Amid Coronavirus Quarantine

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Lecrae Conducts Homeless Outreach & Releases New Single Amid Coronavirus Quarantine

Gearing up to drop a new single, Lecrae would normally be traveling to New York and LA, performing on talk shows and late-night TV. Instead, he’s filming TikTok clips in his basement.

In between posting reports about coronavirus on social channels, swapping jokes about quarantine in group text threads, and helping out his three kids as a sudden “homeschool dad,” the award-winning artist weighed whether to go on releasing new music as scheduled. With so much of normal life put on hold, is now the time to push out a new song?

“I initially was taken aback thinking about how this affected me. That’s everyone’s first thing: Oh my gosh, what does this mean for my life ?” Lecrae said in an interview with CT. “Then I don’t know what happened, but I just sat back and thought, ‘Wait a minute.’”

Lecrae reached out to a friend who runs the Atlanta charity Love Beyond Walls. On Thursday, they teamed up to install portable sinks throughout the city to help slow the spread of the virus among people experiencing homelessness. “When people living on the street don’t have the means … we should step in to wash their hands. #Setmefree #corona (my man did get a meal btw),” he wrote on Instagram. “This is not the end. #Restoration is coming.”

Restoration is the name of Lecrae’s album due out in May, written after a period of personal and spiritual strain led him to appreciate God’s promises anew. The debut single, “Set Me Free,” releases today. The more Lecrae thought about his music, the more he realized it was exactly the encouragement he wanted to share right now.

“The thing that has been consistent, even before coronavirus came, is we spent a lot of time in prayer about this project,” said Lecrae, co-founder and president of Reach Records. “We all felt like this was very beneficial and needed for the world, and I think now it is obvious why in some ways that God would have put this project on our hearts and have me want to put it out.”

“Set Me Free,” featuring YK Osiris, opens with the familiar line from the gospel duo Mary Mary’s “Shackles (Praise You)” and repeats the theme of breaking from shackles: Shackles on my feet, you broke the hold and now I’m free / Even in the darkest times, you kept your light on me.

Many fellow Christian artists, hard-hit by canceled tours and shows, have also made the decision to keep putting out their work as a way to bring hope and joy to fans.

“Social distancing doesn’t mean spiritual distancing. There is no Resurrection Sunday without a Good Friday. This is Good Friday for a lot of us,” he said. “We are figuring that out now, and hopefully some creative things happen in light of it.”

When you announced your decision to release the single, you referenced the line from Joel about how God redeems the years the locusts have eaten (2:25). What were some of the scriptural themes that came through as you were preparing this new song and new album?

I was going through a difficult time a couple of years back where I just felt as if, “Man, there is nothing I can do to change my circumstances. God, you’re going to have to do this. There are some broken things in my world and in my life—I’m having marital issues, I’m having financial issues, I’m having faith issues—and you’re going to have to restore this because I don’t have the wherewithal to do it.” And he did just that. He led me to those verses, to Joel, where I’m remembering that there is nothing that God cannot fix, that he is consistent with mending a broken world. That’s just what he does. Looking at Jonah, Jonah’s life is big to me, how he was at his wit’s end but yet God had a greater narrative in mind and took him through all of that pain and turmoil to bring him out on the other side, refined and better.

I’m witnessing God change circumstances that I couldn’t change, and I want other people to experience that. I want people to have the freedom to say things are not like I planned them to be, and it hurts, but I trust that God is good and that he has a greater plan for this. I think about Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans that I have for you,” and that God has good plans for us, but there is no 29:11 without 29:4–10, where they’re exiled, they’re prisoners. God is saying you can have this promise, but the promise is for you because of these problems.

I think people can relate to that. Everyone has had times where they thought, “What am I going to do now? Is God going to come through?” For you, how does that mindset affect your creative process?

I was writing songs saying, “God, help me get out of this dark place,” and then he was faithful to do it. I realized he is so devoted to me that that brought me joy. Even though my circumstances hadn’t quite changed, there was a joy in knowing that God was walking with me through it, and that sparked a lot of creativity and a lot of desire for people to know, man, he is with me right now, he is with you. Songs just started coming and coming and coming.

A lot of times people [think differently about] someone like myself who has had some musical success—Grammys, No. 1 albums, and dinners with Kanye or dinners with Jay-Z or Selena Gomez or whatnot. I wanted to strip away all those things and say behind all that was a person dealing with insecurities, and God had to show me what really mattered.

Source: Christianity Today

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Dealing with doubts: Coronavirus and my favorite prayer in Scripture

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Dealing with doubts: Coronavirus and my favorite prayer in Scripture

There is so much we don’t know about the COVID-19 pandemic.

We don’t know when cases in the US will peak or how long they will last afterward. We don’t know if surviving a COVID-19 infection means we gain long-lasting immunity or if we can become reinfected. We don’t know if the virus will be affected by warmer temperatures in the spring and summer, or, if it is, whether we will see a second onslaught of infections in the fall. We don’t know if measures to keep us from infecting each other will work. We don’t know if vaccine and therapy trials now underway will work. 

At a time like this, it’s easy to wonder if prayer does much good. We pray for our leaders, for our healthcare providers, for our friends and families and ourselves. But if you’re like most of us, there’s an unstated, perhaps unadmitted doubt in the back of your mind—will my prayers really make any difference? They can fall into the “why not” category: something that doesn’t cost us anything but a little time and might make a difference. But who really knows? 

In my spring sermon series, we are following Jesus to Easter and watching him change lives along the way. Last week, we saw him save Peter from drowning on the stormy Sea of Galilee in response to the fisherman’s prayer, “Lord, save me!” (Matthew 14:30). The Greek is really just two words: “Lord, save!” 

It’s the shortest prayer in the Bible, and one we can pray any time in any storm. 

Today we’ll shift from the shortest prayer in Scripture to my favorite prayer in Scripture. It’s one that I’ve prayed many times over the years. It’s one that you may need to learn to pray in these hard days. 

Before we learn it, let me ask you: What questions or doubts or struggles are most on your heart today?

They may be about the coronavirus pandemic, but they may be about something else. One tragedy about disease epidemics is that other diseases don’t stop being…

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Coronavirus Cases in China Decline as Number of Deaths in Italy Surge

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Coronavirus Cases in China Decline as Number of Deaths in Italy Surge


Coronavirus Cases in China Decline as Number of Deaths in Italy Surge

The death toll in Italy surged past China’s death toll on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. the Army started making plans to set up mobile military hospitals to be placed in major cities. Other medical centers in the U.S. are setting up drive-thru testing sites.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the United Nations in New York that the world is “at war with a virus” and that “a global recession, perhaps of record dimensions, is a near certainty.”

“If we let the virus spread like wildfire — especially in the most vulnerable regions of the world – it would kill millions of people,” he said.

In Italy, which has a population of 60 million, there have been more than 3,400 deaths, about 150 more than in China, which boasts a population over 20 times larger.

However, Wuhan, the Chinese city where coronavirus first emerged, has since recorded no new infections.

Health officials have said Italy’s high death toll is because of the city’s population of elderly people. Italy has the second-oldest population in the world, and about 87 percent of its dead have been over 70 years old.

Meanwhile, Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, a virologist at Germany’s Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine said the death rate is also because of a “collapse” of Italy’s health system.

There have also been reports of people still using public…

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Robin Schumacher on Evidence of Christianity and The Spiderman Fallacy

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Robin Schumacher on Evidence of Christianity and The Spiderman Fallacy

An atheist that I was dialoguing with a while back tried to support his disbelief in Jesus through the use of the “Spiderman fallacy”, which is a contrived argument that has been defined in the following way by Urban Dictionary:

Archaeologists 1,000 years from now unearth a collection of Spiderman comics. From the background art, they can tell it takes place in New York City. NYC is an actual place, as confirmed by archaeology. However, this does not mean that Spiderman existed.

Often used to illustrate the flaw in the assertion by evangelical Christians that archaeologists unearthing biblical cities today “proves” that the Bible was written by a supernatural force.

The Spiderman Fallacy is committed any time the discovery of a mundane element from a myth, legend, or story is taken to mean that ALL other parts of that story, even the supernatural, are also true.[1]

Let me explain why I believe atheists should not use this argument to try and support their skeptical position on Christianity and whether Jesus actually existed.

Perhaps there are Christians who argue along the lines of “because Jerusalem exists, Jesus also existed…”, but no Christian apologist or theologian I’ve ever listened to has argued in this manner. The Spiderman fallacy argument misstates the true argument that good apologists make, which is this: We tend to trust people who get their facts straight.

Take for example the author of the gospel of Luke and Acts. By all standards of measure, he shows himself to be a top-notch historian, a fact demonstrated by such credible scholars such as Colin Hemer in his work The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History.

Of Luke, historian and archaeologist Sir William Ramsay said: “Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statement of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense; he fixes his mind on the idea and plan that rules in the evolution of history, and proportions the scale of his treatment to the importance of each incident… . In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”[2]

Why are such accreditations important? Because historical accuracy matters; an author who shows him/herself to be correct in matters that can be falsified should be granted trust in matters that cannot be directly investigated.

F. F. Bruce puts it like this: “Now, all these evidences of accuracy are not accidental. A man whose accuracy can be demonstrated in matters where we are able to test it is likely to be accurate even where the means for testing him are not available. Accuracy is a habit of mind, and we know from happy (or unhappy) experience that some people are habitually accurate just as others can be depended upon to be inaccurate. Luke’s record entitles him to be regarded as a writer of habitual accuracy.”[3]

This is the direct argument of Christian apologists where the New Testament is concerned. The Spiderman fallacy takes a big misstep right out of the blocks in misrepresenting this fact.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Robin Schumacher

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Advocates Start Petition for Pornhub to be Shut Down for Giving Free Premium Service to Italians on Lockdown Over Coronavirus

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Advocates Start Petition for Pornhub to be Shut Down for Giving Free Premium Service to Italians on Lockdown Over Coronavirus

Amid an ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a pornography video hosting site that many are presently urging be shut down entirely is offering free premium service to Italian users.

In Europe, Italy has borne the brunt of the global COVID-19 outbreak and the southern European nation has been on lockdown for several days. As a result of the largely incapacitated nation, smut giant Pornhub announced it is opening its vault of videos for the whole country and is donating March proceeds to ModelHub, reports say.

The video site has faced a wave of scrutiny in recent weeks as a Change.org petition, launched by the prostitution abolitionist group Exodus Cry’s Laila Mickelwait, has garnered over half a million signatures and continues to grow. Mickelwait and others have blasted the site for allowing videos to be uploaded that are incidents of human trafficking and the rape of minors, thus facilitating and profiting off of the abuse.

“It is no surprise that Pornhub admitted to verifying the trafficked 15-year-old girl who was sexually abused in 58 videos on its site. The official Twitter account for Pornhub wrote in response to the breaking story that the 15-year-old girl had been a verified member. After quickly realizing it had just admitted to assisting in her being trafficked, the account deleted the tweets, but the evidence of the admission was cached and still exists,” Mikelwait notes in her petition.

The site is now reportedly publishing coronavirus-themed pornography, including a video that features a healthcare worker wearing a hazmat suit.

Critics point out that Pornhub is owned by tech company Mindgeek, a Canadian outfit officially registered in Luxembourg, and is using the pandemic to gather and monetize data, that there is nothing charitable about their offering of “free” premium access, and that it is yet another way of exploiting people’s misery and weakness in a hard time for their own financial gain.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Brandon Showalter

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CBN News Asks Dr. Perlmutter Your Questions About the Coronavirus Outbreak

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CBN News Asks Dr. Perlmutter Your Questions About the Coronavirus Outbreak

CBN News Medical Reporter Lorie Johnson spoke with Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist, immune system expert and best-selling author to ask him your latest questions about the coronavirus pandemic. 

Here are the questions being addressed in this Q&A:

Cheryl: Is this similar to the Asian flu and if so does that mean people who had it are immune to the current virus? 

Steven: Do Vitamins C and D help?

Diana: What are the symptoms and what is a high fever in people over 65 compared to younger people?

Karen: Is wearing a mask helpful if you need to go out?

Don: Does already having a pneumonia shot help?

Marcie: My husband flew back from Switzerland. He is self-isolating with me. We need some groceries. How soon is it safe for me to go?

You can submit new questions to us for our next Q&A at [email protected]. We are answering them in the order in which we receive them.

Source CBN

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Cash is being shunned for fear of spreading virus: A Shepherd you can trust today

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Cash is being shunned for fear of spreading virus: A Shepherd you can trust today

Can paper money spread coronavirus?

A growing number of businesses and people worldwide are afraid so.

They have stopped using banknotes out of fear that paper currency, handled by tens of thousands of people, could be a vector for spreading the virus. Businesses are refusing to accept currency; some countries are urging their citizens to stop using banknotes altogether.

However, public officials and health experts say that the risk of transferring the virus in this way is small.

Other ways we pay for items are just as likely to be vectors for disease transfer, if not more so. Credit and debit cards are made of plastic and metal. ATMs are touched by hundreds of human hands every day.

And the Federal Reserve has taken efforts to ensure the money supply is not contaminated. Banknotes that circulated in Asia and Europe are being quarantined for seven to ten days as a “precautionary measure,” according to a Federal Reserve spokesperson.

The fear of cash reveals something important about human
nature.

A Shepherd you can trust today

In these days when so much seems out of control, it’s
natural to control what we can. I cannot keep people from sneezing, but I can
stay six feet away from them. I cannot protect our country, but I can protect
myself and my family.

Of course, the best way to handle what we cannot control is
to trust it to someone who can.

We go to doctors in the belief that they can treat illnesses
we cannot. We seek the help of attorneys with legal challenges because they
have training and experience we do not. Unless you’re a home builder, you
probably trusted a home builder to build your home. Unless you’re an automobile
mechanic, you probably trust automobile mechanics to repair your car.

The best way to deal with what we cannot control about
coronavirus is to trust it to the One who can.

The psalmist prayed, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel,
you who lead Joseph like a flock. You who are…

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United Methodist Church Postpones General Conference amid COVID-19 Pandemic

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United Methodist Church Postpones General Conference amid COVID-19 Pandemic


United Methodist Church Postpones General Conference amid COVID-19 Pandemic

The United Methodist Church, anticipating action on a proposal that could split the denomination, has postponed its quadrennial General Conference, which was scheduled for May 5-15 in Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis Convention Center notified the Executive Committee of UMC’s Commission on the General Conference that the venue was not holding large events through May 10, a news release from the church’s press center said.

The convention center’s restrictions, the release said, are based on Minnesota Department of Health recommendations to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, which has caused a global pandemic of respiratory illness and death. The virus is also known as COVID-19.

The release quoted Kim Simpson, chair of the General Conference Commission, who said the convention center’s restrictions are “not unexpected based on the current guidance from health officials, and we expect to move forward with new plans as quickly as possible.”

The release said the commission “has been monitoring the situation for some time” and had scheduled a teleconference of the full commission for March 21 to discuss plans for the event. Only the full commission has the authority to change the date of the General Conference, the release said.

As of Wednesday, that teleconference was still scheduled, the release said, but added that it’s uncertain when the commission would be able to…

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