Maybe what we need to survive this pandemic is a CAN-DO-mic. Because as the news gets bleaker and badder, what’s wrong with focusing on the CAN-DO side of God? Seriously. Is there anything God can’t do? That’s what the mantled Stranger outside Abraham’s tent asked the patriarch: “Is there anything too hard for the LORD?” (Genesis 18:14) I.e., “Come on, Abraham, can you think of anything at all God cannot do?” Rhetorical question, of course. And the answer came nine months later in the squalling infant Sarah gave birth to at her and Abraham's “ripe old age.”

God must love that side of Himself. After all, He instructed Abraham to call Him El Shaddai, the Almighty God (Genesis 17:1). He is the God who CAN DO it.

Hudson Taylor, the intrepid missionary to China—who served that great people for fifty years—remarked once to his friends: “‘I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done” (Rebecca McLaughlin Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion 41). 

I love that—while we’re nearly overwhelmed by what has befallen us—what appears to us as utterly impossible and absolutely difficult gets suddenly done. By whom? By the CAN DO God you and I worship and love. Done!

“Well then, I hope He is done with this pandemic.” So do I. Though, of course, I don’t believe the pandemic is His creation. I am persuaded Jesus nailed it when He announced, “An enemy has done this” (Matthew 13:28).

“Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous” (The Great Controversy 590).

So we know whom to thank. But even what the enemy has done to you, to me, to those who suffer, even to those who have died at the hands of this deadly pestilence is even yet reversible. “‘I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and [the grave]’” (Revelation 1:18).

El Shaddai gets the last word. Always. And you can be sure, it will be a CAN DO word.

So, as the little note card our daughter, Kristin attached to her bedroom mirror when she was a girl declares: “Don’t go to God to tell Him you have a big problem—go to your problem and tell it you have a BIG God!”

His name is El Shaddai, the Almighty CAN DO God. And He will do whatever it takes to get you through this lockdown, this life. He has nail-scarred hands to prove it.