Today is Friday the 13th.  It's not frequent, it's not often, but it happens.  As I think about the centuries of superstitions behind the meaning that we attach to this day, I also think about COVID-19 and the terror it is unleashing around the globe.  We may wonder how such things as this happen, we may wonder what these things mean.  If you are of a superstitious bent, you may sense an omen.  Or a portent.  Or nothing at all.
     Regardless, the virus is real.  As I look across the planet on this Friday the 13th, I see something close to mass hysteria as people and the nations they inhabit seek shelter from the storm, the storm of infection, the storm of potential death.  It can be frightening, genuinely frightening.  And it is.
     How easy it is to say that God loves us.  How easy it is to say that God cares.  These are fundamental bulwarks of Christian belief.  Yet we may not always see evidences of these truths in our lives, much less the lives of the countries to which we belong.  We may look for comfort elsewhere.  And we may well find it.
     To a point.  Though it isn't always easy to believe in the unseen, it is perhaps, in this case, the braver option.  We may not always understand the ways of "beyondness," but we understand even less the capricious contusions of a broken world:  why?  Why this?  Why that?
     The only reason we ask such things, however, is that we assume that the world has meaning, and that we who live and die in it therefore have meaning, too.  Yet how do we know this without knowing why we do?
     As a French writer pointed out a number of years ago, we cannot live without belief, a belief that, whatever we suppose or think, the world is bigger than we think.