President Nelson's Gratitude Challenge

I've been listening to all kinds of perspectives about President Nelson's #GiveThanks challenge. It seems to me like the Church's energy could've been spent much better on a campaign about humility instead of gratitude.

The pandemic is the closest thing to divine retribution, where those who dug a pit for their neighbors have fallen in themselves, as I've ever seen in my lifetime. To focus on positivity in this moment, I feel, misses the point of what God has always communicated through disease. Plagues and diseases in scripture are the great equalizers in society, where those with with, power, and position are finally forced onto equal footing with everyone else, experiencing the same devastation that their money can't protect them from.

Like famines and droughts, they cease only when there is a humbling of spirit, a reckoning with the moral failure within one's own soul. When selfishness and indifference to our neighbor's suffering is confronted, challenged, and finally eliminated.

I find it interesting that what this situation calls for most—submission to the empirical knowledge of secular authorities in the wearing of masks, and the solitude and reflection of social distancing—are acts that require humility particularly from religious individuals. 

Like many of the policies from this administration, how we respond to COVID-19 and the restrictions that attend to it reveal his much we really value ourselves and our neighbor. We're all collectively witnessing this in families, in employments, and in society as a whole.

When we reach the end of this, we will know who the villains are who surround us. We will see the private evils in the businesses we have our money to, the schools that teach our children, the organizations we supports, and the institutions that claim to care for us.

We have a choice. 

We can look the truth in the face, accept the facts as they have always existed around us, and rise to the challenge we've been given.

Or we can look away, hide our faces in shame, and maintain the status quo as it existed before all of this began. 

A necessary component of what will allow us to make the right choice is not gratitude alone. It will be humility that heals us, and ultimately asked us to go forth from this moment changed and bettered by the experience.