Life Is a Test In 2022: Will We Pass?

“All through my life, I have been tested. My will has been tested, my courage has been tested, my strength has been tested. Now my patience and endurance are being tested.”― Muhammad Ali, 2004

A test.

That’s what it feels like to me the past two years has been about. Like life is a test. Like all the huge cataclysms and social upheavals, we’ve experienced collectively in the past 104 weeks or so; it is as if life itself is testing us, to see how we all will do and respond. 

I mean in your lifetime—have you ever experienced such dramatic and so many world altering events as those that have happened since the second week of March 2020?  Yes, it’s only been that long ago since it all started. First COVID, as in lockdowns, as in remote school and work, as in so many deaths, as in overflowing hospitals and nursing homes becoming prison like and surgeries getting cancelled and workers putting their health on the line for us and those ever-besieged health care workers who are still at it, today, tending the sick and the dying. They certainly must think it is a test.

In these weeks we’ll mark 730 or so days ago that our world changed in the blink of an eye. One day the country is wondering if Joe Biden can beat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. The next day the newspaper headline spoke for itself: “FEAR, CANCELLATIONS SPREAD”.  And then the headline on Friday March the 13^th: SHUT DOWN.

Thus begins our test.

If it was just COVID that would have been awful enough. Maybe we could have handled just one global crisis. Then the pile on began. The murder of George Floyd and how his tragic death brought our nation to a place of racial reckoning, to face our collective sin. Then an ugly national election in the fall of 2020. Then an attempted violent overthrow of the United States government and a legitimate election in January of 2021. Then a President impeached for the second time. Then an overheated economy and $4 a gallon gas and sky-high housing costs. Then, an awful, bloody, violent war in Ukraine, in Europe, waged by a blood thirsty despot who shows no signs of offering any mercy. A tyrant sitting on top of 6,000 nuclear weapons.

Now can you see why this all might seem like a test?

Like life or the universe or fate or chaos is just piling on the disasters to see how we as a world and as individuals will step up. Does humanity have the right stuff to survive, maybe even thrive? Or will these calamitous cumulative events force us to put up our hands and declare, “I give up.” Cry “Uncle!”

It'd be understandable if we did so. WE ARE STRESSED! A recent poll by the American Psychological Association of some 2,000 Americans, as of March 2022, shows we’re pretty much freaking out about everything. Eighty seven percent of us stressed about fast rising costs. Eighty four percent about the “terrifying to watch” invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Sixty-nine percent fear for a possible World War III.

I’d be more stressed, if I was not so stressed, if all of this drama was just rolling off of my back and I was going with the flow, you know, doot in da doo doo, feeling groovy! Nope. Instead, I’m carrying a lot of worry right now as I know so many of my fellow Americans are, as are the folks in the church I serve, as are the people in my family I love, as are the friends I spend each with on Zoom who lament with me, somehow making this shared life test easier to face into.

Some might say God is the one testing the world; to use Albert Einstein’s famous metaphor, God is “playing dice with the universe” to teach us a lesson. I just can’t see God as being that cruel or calculating. Instead, what if God is the one who gives us all our common humanity, a common heart absolutely breaking wide open at the sight of so many innocent folks suffering in Ukraine. A human community outraged at this war, united in its opposition to the Putin and his evil actions.  Maybe this universal spirit gives us the strength to not be bowed by this test called life in 2022, but instead spiritually buoyed, called to action, stepping up in the face of so much challenge. Maybe to live in these times is a gift and even a privilege somehow.

We get to witness history. We get to make history in how we choose to live in these days of testing. Dare we live in hope, trusting times will get better? Dare we live with compassion, responding to so much pain with so much care and mercy? Dare we take this test and yes, maybe even ace this test?

Life is a test. Grant us the wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days. For the taking of this test.