Greetings friends far and near and welcome to the Tuesday, May 26, 2020 post from Peachtree Baptist Church, my name is Paul Capps, pastor. Today I’m thinking about adaptation. Soon we will have to be thinking about resuming services in our building, and all the changes that will happen in order for us to worship together again. It’s an older meme now but I’ve included the image in today’s blog portion - this idea that pastors had to pivot in an instant from one way they had been taught and expected to preach, teach and lead worship to a totally different model.  We joke about it, but the truth of course is that everyone in the world had to adapt in some way or another to the news of this pandemic, whether it was dramatically or not. I have read many articles and you probably have too: about how this pandemic has shifted priorities, about how it has a silver lining that will help us make better choices as a culture going forward, about how  we’ll have to adapt to the waves of loss will be with us for a long time, about how this pandemic has exposed our differences so that we might adapt to focusing on the common good. 

We are living in an extraordinarily complex time. Being ready to adapt is hard enough, but the actual energy involved in the process of adaptation is exhausting. Some of that is because we don’t want to change and resist it, but some of it is just because we are human.

On Sunday we looked at 1 Peter 5:6-10. I have gone back to this short passage several times over the past couple of days because it continues to provide me with a lot of encouragement. It is both a challenge and a comfort to think about all that these churches were going through in these beginning years of the Christianity and how they were having to adapt. Jesus had come and everything had changed. How were these new Christians going to reflect God’s ultimate purpose of restoration?

One day Jesus will return and we will adapt again, but it will be in an instant. It is something that the early church longed for, prayed for and expected. They believed that the very best thing that could happen was the return of Jesus. Are we as people of faith actively living into longing as well? It’s going to be different for everyone, but for me, I’m trying to be more patient and to practice the fruits of the Spirit, to humble myself and not think that I have answers beyond what Jesus has already given us, to give my anxieties over to God, to be alert, to resist temptation and to stand firm in knowing that God, by faith in Christ, has empowered me by the Spirit to adapt to looking as much like Jesus as I know how, no matter the circumstances. And to constantly be praying: come, Lord Jesus, come.