Last week, I managed to eek out a few words to end my blogging hiatus. I summarized two short articles I wrote recently, as well as the longer article they were based on, and the super-long dissertation that dozens (or maybe a dozen) of people have read.
There was one thing I almost included, but I clicked “post,” and forgot, and then I decided it was worth a follow up. This is the very beginning and very end of an article I use in Forestgate’s Officer Training curriculum, and most of it doesn’t appear in the two short articles linked above. Without further ado, here it is:
I wanted a break, and instead I got COVID. But it all worked out in the end.
In 2020, I wrote a dissertation, and I remember thinking halfway through the task, “Boy, I could use a break when this is over.” I planned to scale back my schedule temporarily, maybe use some vacation time and gear up for the next phase of ministry. Instead, I got COVID. I don’t mean that I actually got the virus. I just mean that instead of a break, I got the multi-faceted challenge that was COVID.
Over the course of that multi-faceted challenge, I questioned most of the principles I thought I had learned about teamwork and leadership as a pastor (or teaching elder) at a mid-sized Reformed church. And then a funny thing happened a year and a half after I defended my dissertation on April Fool’s Day 2020 (no, really): I re-read my dissertation, and I decided that those principles hadn’t changed. My confidence in them was shaken for a time, but, no, the wisdom of eight godly men whom I interviewed (and countless books I read) survived a pandemic and then some. What did God teach me through them? Many things, including one that seems too obvious.
I’ll skip the first 28 lessons I learned and jump to the end:
God taught me to stay calm. Perhaps this is the one principle that was most tested during the trials of COVID-life in ministry. Did I succeed? Probably not as well as I would have wanted. But I did survive, so that I can live another day, serve another day. And maybe tomorrow I’ll apply one of the most hard-earned lessons of the past few years: “Calm, like anxiety, is contagious.”[1]
I wanted a break after I finished my dissertation, but instead I got COVID. I got a season of intense testing, to see if all of these lessons about calm, patience, humility, and respect were what I really needed. Indeed, those qualities and more were what I needed. I only doubted it because of how greatly they were tested. But that testing was what I needed, though I did not realize it at the time.
Two years after my dissertation was finished, two years after COVID started, I read the words that Abigail Adams wrote to her son, future President John Quincy Adams: “It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.” (Emphasis added)
Therefore, God also taught me that sometimes when I think I need a break, what I really need is a test. Thank you, Lord, for letting me survive this test. May I thrive when the next test comes, and may I calmly cling to you, in the stillness or the storm.
-Pastor Matt, 11-14-25
[1] Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, 147.