I pulled a book out of my library last week by one of a handful of authors I return to, Philip Yancey. Where Is God When It Hurts still is a powerful treatment of the painful subject of human suffering. I went back through it, this time taking notes, given the front and center place the pandemic has bestowed suffering.

Yancey quotes the novelist Peter De Vries, who “called the problem of pain ‘the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart’” (20). The snagging fishhook of Why?

Last week the leaders of the Greater New York and the North-Eastern conferences invited me to a Zoom conversation. (Will there be Zoom in heaven?—I am praying not—it’s not that I’m ungrateful for the technology—but oh boy, after a while it sure loses its shine!) In conversation with these church leaders in the Big Apple, I learned that this COVID-19 pandemic has not only turned New York City into the nation’s epicenter for this coronavirus.

You probably saw the headline a few days ago, “As famines of ‘biblical proportion’ loom, Security Council urged to ‘act fast’” (UN News www.news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272). Biblical proportions? Weren’t we talking about famines a few days ago ourselves?

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.”

No sense beating around the bush. Let's pretend we're kids once again and it’s very OK for us to pester our father with the familiar question: "Are we there yet?" Of course, I’m not thinking of our father, but rather our Father who is in heaven. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, has become the media's go-to authority amid these dark days of the coronavirus pandemic. His quick mind and candid assessments of the disease's strength and spread have become a daily mainstay for Americans. In an interview yesterday with Wall Street Journal's podcast he offered this candid advice for Americans when the pandemic finally ends: "Speaking about the eventual return to normal life, Dr. Fauci said: 'When you gradually come back, you don't jump into it with both feet.