Loving Well Today (Johanna Christophel)

With Sarah and Ebony at one of our law student reading group events

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13)

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. (Galatians 6:9)

Two and a half weeks ago, a group of us from The Carver Project’s law student reading group gathered at Three Kings for one last hurrah before Spring Break. Over pub chips and pretzels, we talked about life and law school and barely mentioned the coronavirus, which still felt like a distant threat. When we parted ways at the end of the night, we thought we were saying goodbye for only a few days. For those of us in our final semester, we certainly did not believe we were about to close an entire chapter of our lives.

A week later, everything had changed. Spring Break was extended, classes and work were moved online, and graduation was cancelled. Many of us packed up and moved home—or didn’t even return to St. Louis at all.

During this extra week of Spring Break, a sense of early, unexpected loss has sunk in for me: some of us will never be returning to the community rhythms we’ve shared together for the past few years. We will not again squish into Professor Inazu’s living room for reading group. Our families will not meet at The Carver Project’s annual graduation celebration in May.

And as I grieve the lost time with my cherished community, I am struck by the fact that our faith calls us to hold tomorrow loosely while loving and doing good urgently anyway—regardless of a pandemic or any other crisis we confront. As Christians, we know that God holds eternity in his hands, but we never know what tomorrow will bring. The Christian life places two things in tension: because we do not know what tomorrow holds, we must always love as if tomorrow will not come and do good as if it will. 

In a tiny but influential 1949 book called Christianity and History, Oxford Professor Herbert Butterfield wrote these challenging words:

It is not open to any of us to say that we will postpone what philosophers call ‘the good life’—postpone any of the higher purposes of mankind—until the world is more happily placed or the environment more congenial. . . . All the time it has been a case of plucking beauty out of dangerous crags and crevices, and making sure that there should be music somewhere though apparently the world was generally near the edge of the abyss. And we must have our Elizabethan literature even though the Spanish Armada may be coming, because it is always part of the game that the good life must be attained now, no matter at what date in history you place the ‘now.’

In these days of social distancing, self-quarantines, and news dominated by crises, living the good life, loving our neighbors, and creating beauty is increasingly difficult. But it is in exactly these times that we are called to not grow weary.

Love well today because we feel like our world is “near the edge of the abyss.” Scrub your hands for the sake of the immunocompromised. Drop groceries off on your elderly friends’ doorstep. Remotely maintain the regular rhythms of your friendships that are now separated by geography or social distancing.

Even in the weariness of the coming days, may we be known as a people who continue to love, continue to do good and create beauty, and continue to push back the Fall, knowing that tomorrow—as every day—will come as God permits.

Johanna Christophel is Board Secretary of The Carver Project and a third-year law student at Washington University in St. Louis.

For Further Reading:

• Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History

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