March Madness
March 14, 2022
If you are a basketball fan, there’s a time of year that is extra special and often memorable. It’s the time when you’re talking about brackets, bubble teams, and buzzer beaters. We’re hyped up about March Madness!
March Madness refers to that time of year (usually mid-March through the beginning of April) when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men's and women's college basketball tournaments are held.
That term somehow captures the excitement that swirls around the sports world as tournament time approaches. In the weeks leading up to the "Big Dance," as it is called, hundreds of college basketball teams from all over the United States fight to earn a spot in the tournament. Basketball fans begin marking off time in their schedules so NOTHING can disturb them from being super fans and watching all the games. I could tell you stories…
But March 11, 2020, everything came to a standstill. It was beyond everyone’s control. A new disease had started terrorizing the world just weeks earlier. Rudy Gobert, pro athlete, tested positive for the dreaded disease. The next day the NCAA announced it was canceling March Madness and the tournaments because an infection we didn’t understand was pervasive and deadly and was killing people all over the planet. It seemed unthinkable. But two years ago today, I and many, many others began to realize that the world might be changing forever. And now we know it has.
We are two years in and still have many questions about how this got started and how to handle it. The coronavirus has mutated into various other forms, and we do now have a controversial vaccine that seems to be largely providing protection from the worse- case scenarios. But far worse than missing March Madness for two years is the over six million people who are now missing—dead from the virus. There are many with lifelong issues that will follow them.
Then, there are the unintended consequences. Many families broke up during the stress of COVID. Schools were emptied and the education of our children was compromised. Churches are still figuring out how to proceed in our new normal. People are now unused to coming to services and some say it has spread the already growing phenomenon of deconstruction of faith. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses have permanently closed. Many people learned to work from home, and no one knows for sure what the face of working will look like in the days ahead. The “great resignation” has found us without people to fill jobs all over the nation.
The national scene had tensions so high that race and political relationships sunk to a near all-time low during COVID. And now we have the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Honestly, there seems to be too much pain for our fragile world to bear.
And we didn’t even know it was about to happen until it did.
Our world has surely changed. It will never be the same again, in ways we don’t yet know. The pandemic is now changing to an endemic, which means it will always be around but basically under control with vaccines, etc., like the flu. It makes you wonder what will change next.
I don’t know. The scientists don’t know. People in their craving for certainty came up with all kinds of conspiracy theories because we HAVE to have explanations to make us feel in control. But it’s a delusion. We are NOT in control. But we can know the One who is. A song written in the flux and change of the early 1900s by Jennie Wilson tells us where security lies for 2022 and beyond:
Time is filled with swift transition,
Naught of earth unmoved can stand,
Build your hopes on things eternal,
Hold to God’s unchanging hand.
Hold to God’s unchanging hand,
Hold to God’s unchanging hand;
Build your hopes on things eternal,
Hold to God’s unchanging hand.