How can we bless in times of disease,
we who are natural spreaders, our lives
dedicated to pandemics of health—
holding back is strange to us. We are huggers,
hand shakers, kissers of both cheeks. Our
greetings are stunted in this plague.
We are crossers of paths, of borders, we
embed ourselves, many of us.
We are foreign bodies,
we long to be pathogens of purity.
How do we bless in these days?
We bless as we always have—with
love balanced on wisdom,
in defiance of both negligence and fear.
So I bless you—
spreaders of the gospel in Jesus’s name,
with noses sensitive to opportunity,
able to discern accurately where
love must be applied in our neighborhoods,
in our atmospheres.
I bless you in Jesus’s name with the easy
breath of God's Spirit, wholesome,
pure, and deeply good,
who comforts and drives
us to comfort, who
ministers and drives us to minister.
I bless you in Jesus’s name with the
wisdom of your lives—that they will be
neither wasted nor left unspent.
And may God, who inhabits all times
both before and after safety,
before and after illnesses,
before and after death,
advance his Kingdom.
May it be a breath of healing in our world,
the natural exhale of the gospel
that we spread.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Erickson and his wife Annie live in Pretoria, South Africa. The Ericksons are part of Novo's Ethne collective and minister to churches and church leaders in the region. Dan is also a member of the Prime Creative prayer team.