The Spiritual Pandemic of Broken-Hearted Parents

I'm fleshing some thoughts and conversations into a future book that is considerably off in the future. But I've had so many broken-hearted parents of adult children confide in me or ask for words of comfort and advice. I don't see this being addressed the way it needs to be. On the other hand, I don't want the paid side of this Substack column to focus on the heartbreak of raising adult children, so we'll plan on releasing an excerpt about once a month. Your comments will be most welcome, as this is certainly a work in progress (and one of my editors thinks there just isn't a big enough market for a book like this anyway). 

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I got off the phone and thought, “So this isn’t going to be something that lasts two weeks. This is serious. This is going to take a long time.”

Spring of 2021 was going to be an Asian Spring for me. Churches in five different Asian countries had been asking me to come out to speak, but it’s so difficult (time and energy-wise) to travel that far that my assistant came up with the brilliant idea to put them all together. She worked with churches and organizers who all settled on February 2021, with some negotiating over who got what weekend, who wanted mid-week, etc. But it was workable—I could get from one country to another, accommodating their needs, if I could set aside a full month of travel.

It was a lot of work for her to balance all the requests, but it was ninety percent set up: what churches I’d be at and where and when. Because there was a lot of travel, we needed to think about reserving our tickets soon.

One phone call in early February of 2020 shut it all down.

“The churches in Asia are canceling,” Alli told me.

“Why?”

“Covid.”

“But the trip isn’t for an entire year!”

“I know. But they think this is going to last a long time.”

They were right, of course. It was never going to be “two weeks to flatten the curve.” About a month later, my calendar for the rest of the year was suddenly free… For whatever reason, those in Asia saw it first.

Covid-19 unleashed a worldwide medical pandemic unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes.

I believe there has been a spiritual pandemic as well, not stemming from COVID-19 (it started maybe a decade before COVID-19 hit), that has left Christian parents reeling. Unlike the Asian trip cancellation, there wasn’t one phone call that alerted me to what was going on. There was one call, and then another, and then a desperate request for prayer after church, and then a counselor unloading on me, and then a veritable, well, pandemic of spiritual hurt, angst, and sometimes abject terror.