Psalm 42:5 Why are you downcast, O my soul?  Why so disturbed within me?  Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and ⁶ my God.

Have you noticed that difficult situations can have a strong impact upon us particularly if they drag on and on?  (Even more difficult is our current situation with the coronavirus where our world has never experienced anything like it.)  Difficult situations can wear us down.   Consider being in a boat without power at sea that is drifting with the current towards a reef.  The sound of the waves pounding the reef are harbingers of the doom that is about to smash our boat and us to smithereens.  It’s just a matter of time…

Think of being overcome with distress and ‘downcast’ as the boat drifts nearer the reef. But then an unseen voice cries out to us, “You are in a sailboat!” We respond, “So?”  The voice speaks again, “Put up your sail!”  (Let’s assume we are really dense)  To which we reply, “What will that do?”

The voice answers, “The wind is blowing away from the reef – and it is stronger than the current!”  We obey the voice and put up the sail – and as we do, the wind catches it and moves us away.  The reef and pounding waves are still there but we are not at their mercy.

At this point, instead of thinking this is a dumb illustration, consider how often we succumb emotionally and spiritually to the stresses in our lives (and currently the coronavirus around us), instead of looking to Christ.  Through our hope and trust in Him, He provides the ‘sail’ and the ‘wind’ to take us to spiritual peace and security; He frees us from being downcast and overcome with fear.

With our focus on Jesus, let us faithfully obey the guidelines being given us by our leaders to stay free from this pandemic.  We are not at the mercy of our circumstances!  In the midst of whatever we find ourselves in, Jesus is our hope, our joy and our strength.  Let us look to Him.