We have all learned by now to expect the unexpected. But the bigger question is the unexpected that will come out of the unexpected.

When something comes out of the blue and disrupts life, it has two main effects. The first is the immediate disruption. The second is the change that flows from that disruption.

It happened right in the middle of an online presentation on eschatology. A young man in the military stationed in Europe asked a question about deliverance ministry. I’m still not sure where in the context of the conversation it came from. I answered as best I could, and contacted him later to set up a time to talk.

Today our daughter and two grandsons were sitting on the deck looking out over the small lake they live on. It was a calm and sunny day. Out of nowhere a waterspout appeared, gathered strength and ripped the roof from their neighbour’s gazebo. They hardly had time to rush into the house when it had gone.

A black swan is a term for an event which comes out of nowhere and upsets everyone’s applecart. The last black swan was probably the day two planes flew into the World Trade Center. That changed our world. Now we’re living in another one.

We are surely living in unusual days.

As we negotiate our way through week after week of isolation, it compels us to ask the question “Why?”

Eastern religions are based largely on fate. Fate does not allow us to ask “Why?” There is simply no answer. It just is, and we have to put up with it. There is no significance and no meaning to life or to what happens to us.

Our present crisis has exposed a fatal weakness in our secular society. We have become utterly dependent on solutions that come from the material world around us. The demise of devastating diseases like polio, measles, diphtheria and many others has left us with a false confidence that medicine is the answer to everything. And then to our shock, we find out it isn’t.