Following the reports from the CDC, I, as your National Via de Cristo Spiritual Director, strongly urge each secretariat to consider canceling gatherings to comply with published recommendations.
Options are:
- Suspend all in-person worship, meetings and activities at least through the end of March.
- Experiment with on-line and phone worship opportunities.
- Use on-line applications such as Go-To-Meeting, Zoom, Video Conferencing, and other on-line tools.
- Communicate regularly with your community through a phone tree, weekly email and/or video.
- Pray every day. Stop what you are doing at noon each day and take some time for prayer. I will be posting prayers for each day via email, Facebook and the NLS website.
- Be especially kind to yourself as you consider your daily hygiene habits.
- Keep your wits about you and remember that this pandemic is not the only time in the world that something like this has happened. It happened in Luther’s day with the Black Plague which killed Europeans by the millions. Luther himself suffered from the Black Plague. He wrote the following to his students at Wittenburg. “I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence.”
May we all respond to this disease crisis with grace and compassion. Thank you for your wise and thoughtful leadership.
Brian is NLS Executive Director, from 2020 to present. He began his Via de Cristo journey on Indiana/Kentucky men’s weekend #57 back in 2008. It was a life-changing experience for him and bred a passion for Christ and the VdC ministry itself.
