By Lindsay Anderson-Beck
Special to The Tribune
Here in Los Angeles, we’re used to – and good at – hurry. Used to the relentless sound of tires on tarmac outside, our car horns blaring as soon as a stoplight turns green. Used to leaving for work an hour before we need to be there. Used to switching lanes for the more efficient one on the highway and at the grocery store. Used to limitless opportunities for entertainment, dining and exercise. Used to perpetually full schedules for ourselves and even fuller ones for our kids.
This season of being “Safer at Home” has thrown us all for a loop. Our schedules are suddenly open, we have no place to be, and the roads are quiet. And yet perhaps, like me, you have an internal compulsion to maintain the same pace of life. Perhaps, like me, you made an enormous “to do” list for the COVID-19 season which includes purging your closet and bookshelves, putting up curtains, picking up new habits, and planning for the future.
Perhaps we are secretly fearful of what value we add if we aren’t always doing.
Last Thanksgiving, I went to my brother-in-law’s family celebration. This was a special holiday for them because the first grandbaby in the family had been born two months earlier and was in attendance. When we shared about what we were most thankful for that year, almost everyone’s answer – from parents to aunts and uncles and grandparents and great grandparents – was “Baby Sophie.” Everyone was totally smitten! I find this somewhat remarkable about babies. Baby Sophie is this tiny, vulnerable, unproductive, totally needy and demanding little being, and yet she is totally beloved. With her, the family is very well-pleased.
What if the same could be true of us? What if our worth, our status as beloved, did not reside in what we could offer anyone else? What if it were simply a grace we have been given through Jesus Christ, and all we have to do is slow down long enough to receive it?
In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 3, we read about Jesus being baptized. The Scriptures say that as Jesus came out of the water “a voice came from heaven” saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (3:22). What’s so important for us to see is that this declaration happens before Jesus has performed any miracles, before his identity is made known to anyone around him, and before he has done anything particularly noteworthy. God simply loves him and is proud of him.
I wonder whether you know this about yourself – before you have gotten breakfast for your kids, or accomplished anything on your COVID-19 to-do list, before you have put in a day’s work at the (home) office, before your Instagram post has received any likes, or your teacher or boss has given you a glowing report – you are God’s Beloved, the one with whom God is well-pleased?
We have a unique opportunity during this time of COVID-19. We are a people unaccustomed to rest, quiet, slowness, emptiness and space. And yet it is, as we cease striving, that we remember God is Creator and we are creations. It is in slowing that we separate ourselves from the lie that we are only worth what we can produce. And it is in quieting down that we can hear the voice of God calling us “the Beloved, ones of whom I am so proud.”
Lindsay Anderson-Beck is interim director of Student Ministries at San Marino Community Church.
