When the Jewish people were in exile you can imagine them thinking, “We’ve just got to get through this and it will be okay.” They did get through it. They returned from exile back to the promised land … and they were disappointed. Things were difficult, problematic, troublesome. They thought they would pick up where they left off but they couldn’t. Someone writing as Isaiah the prophet reminded them that God does not repeat the same old, same old. I am about to create new heavens and a new earth. God does something new. We will get through this time of pandemic but we need to use this time of “sheltering in place” to do something new: more love, more forgiveness, more generosity, more compassion.
