On Quarantine Management, WW2, Shipwrecks, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Two weeks ago I aired out (..confessed?) an unbecoming story of myself transforming into a werewolf thanks to a raging panic attack, howling some swear words into the night sky whilst in my skivvies, and destroying a small, helpless object. An uncomfortable memory to be sure. But one that produced an earnest reflection on God’s goodness, believe it or not.
I also promised to tell you why that panic attack happened.
So. Here ya go. This is short and general. But honest:
COVID-19 turned a job I loved into a job I hated.
**Now, for those who know me and my current work personally: what follows is not me firing shots at anyone or at my college in particular. Really. My college and my leaders (whom I love dearly) have navigated this pandemic with true grit and wisdom. As good or better than any college out there.
COVID-19 itself is the villain here.
All shots go directly to you, dear Rona.
pew, pew**
SO. One day on a Zoom call (isn’t that how all bad stories begin these days?) I…“inherited”…a surprising new title:
Jon Campbell: College Quarantine Manager
…Quarantine Manager you say?
Honestly, friend, there’s not enough emotional energy on your side or my side of this article for me to describe in detail what that meant. Suffice to say, with very little time left before students arrived I was suddenly responsible for creating, communicating, and implementing my college’s entire quarantine plan, and convincing its 1000+ person community to follow it. …while still doing my two actual jobs, grad school, and co-leading a college internship program.
Interpretation: Covid obliterated my job description. Then re-built it into this Frankenstein monster I didn’t even recognize, which was double the size, three times the stress, with no additional pay, of course.
Did I have any desire to wear this new hat, “Quarantine Manager?” ..Nope.
Was I cut out for this kind of task? ..Nope.
Did it feel fair?
It did not.
What it did feel like was a death sentence to my sanity. Frankly, in a lot of ways, it was exactly that for the next 3 months. Stuff was genuinely bad.
And I came to hate things for a while.
*sigh*
…I don’t like that that’s true. I don’t like “hating” anything.
But, it happened.
I hated that the job I loved these last 7 years was suddenly buried underneath a self-regenerating mountain of suffocating, morale-crushing quarantine work I wasn’t cut out for. I hated that my team suffered because I suffered. We drowned day, night, and weekend trying to keep up with a constantly rising number of quarantine cases. I hated going to bed each night with a broken brain, dreading what I’d wake up to find in my inbox, texts, and voicemails the next morning. I hated using every ounce of my energy every day doing work that exclusively drained and depressed me. Work I didn’t ask for.
I hate that, right now, I’m still dealing with left-over anger towards it all. And anxiety that things might get bad again next time the quarantine case load spikes.
After all, I’m still wearing this hat. And Covid-19 is not over.
*double sigh*
…So, there ya go. That’s what triggered my midnight panic attack that hot night in dead July.
I could say more. We all probably could. I know I’m not the only one who suffered. Maybe this happened to your job description too.
Covid stole much, from many.
Some of us lost happiness to Covid. Some, money. Some, health. Some of us lost time. Some, opportunity. Others lost loved ones.
All of us lost something. Most of us are still coping. Many of us will lose more.
This is a time of suffering, friends and readers. Let’s not pretend it isn’t.
My question is: what do I do with all this?
…The fact that these things happened to me. The fact that I had no say in the matter. The fact that my emotions are begging me to blame God and blame my leaders. “After all,” those wounded emotions would say, “obeying him and submitting to them is what led you straight into this depressing nightmare.”
How do we process baggage like this and keep our hearts from turning cold?
…Well, let’s start with the obvious: all is not always well in the life of a disciple.
Our Good Shepherd guarantees bad times. And, wouldn’t ya know it, we’ve been having some of those in 2020. With all that’s happened, we could leave our response to this suffering as flat as, “welp. sometimes life sucks, and that’s that. You win some, you lose some.”
That’s true. But lazy. A real fatalist cop-out.
That response lacks not just faith and courage … It lacks humanity itself. Choosing a posture of indifference toward suffering in a broken world suppresses one of the most human characteristics we have: the yearning to seek and find meaning.
No. The response to suffering God beckons us toward is deeper than indifference and resignation. In fact, it’s a matter of brutal spiritual warfare. Warfare we fight for ourselves and for each other.
It starts with something God teaches us in suffering:
Namely, there’s a difference between facts and narrative. And faith resilience in hard times depends on how well we manage that difference.
Here’s what I mean:
Facts, for the sake of this conversation, are things that happen to you. Life events you don’t control: your parents’ divorce. Being naturally not-skinny. Pandemics. Bad bosses. Inheriting poverty where others inherited privilege. Problems spilling in your lap you didn’t cause…Facts are outside you, beyond your ability to control.
Narrative, on the other hand, is the story you make inside you from the facts that happen outside you. Narrative is internal, a matter of the heart and the head. It’s how you interpret life. It’s what you tell yourself about the “stuff” that happens.…Is God still a good God? Or is He a villain now that my fiancé left me? …Do I still have a purpose? Or has God’s plan abandoned me since my business went under?
Simply put:
Facts equate what happened.
Narrative creates what it means.
While you can’t always control life’s facts, you can always control the faith narrative you make from the facts.
That’s good news because Narrative—not Fact—is where the real power is.
Just ask Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, how much more powerful narratives are than facts.
Hiroo Onoda
Ridiculously Committed WW2 Soldier
Hiroo (name pronounced like a dainty British person saying “hello”) is famous because, well… in 1974 — when the rest of the world was watching The Waltons on TV, reminiscing about Woodstock, protesting the Vietnam conflict, and watching Richard Nixon resign in ignominy over Watergate — Hiroo was still fighting World War 2.
Yes, literally.
No big deal. Except, you know, for the fact that World War 2 ended in 1945 — just a cool three decades earlier.
During WW2, Hiroo Onoda deployed as a Japanese guerilla fighter on Lubang Island in the Philippines where he and his unit were given the order to wage war against Allied forces. This he did. And this he kept doing, and kept doing, and kept doing long after everyone else stopped. Years passed. The war ended. But Hiroo never again heard from his commander. New orders never came. So, he kept doing the old orders while the world moved on without him.
Ironically, in 1945 Hiroo found some U.S. Military pamphlets the Allies had air-dropped onto the island. The pamphlets announced that the war had ended (which it had) and the Allies had won (which they did).
Well. My man Hiroo wasn’t having that nonsense.
Hiroo literally decided that the pamphlets were a trick and, based on that assumption, continued fighting World War 2 BY HIMSELF for a quick twenty-nine more years. The other men in his unit either died or abandoned post (aka, went home). Not Hiroo though. Dude stayed.
29 years later, a Japanese explorer named Norio Suzuki discovered Hiroo still, ya know, being a WW2 soldier. Shocked, Suzuki told Hiroo the war he was fighting had ended long ago.
Hiroo still wasn’t having it. He refused to leave his post saying, “I will not quit fighting unless there is an order that relieves me of my duty.”
Realizing he was serious, Suzuki contacted the Japanese military. Japan then found and sent Hiroo’s old, retired military commander to meet him in the jungle on Lubang Island and personally deliver a new order:
War’s over, son. Lay down your arms. Go home.
So, that day in 1974—nearly thirty years after everyone else—Hiroo Onoda finally laid down his weapons and stopped fighting World War 2.
…Bizarre?
Yep.
But consider this an illustration of the complex relationship between the human psyche, narrative, and facts. A man—completely alone on a jungle island, cut off from everything and everyone he’d ever known—willfully decided to lay aside his civilian life to live, sleep, eat, bathe, relieve himself, and everything else that comes with survival in a remote landscape, in order to keep reporting for duty in a war that had finished 29 years earlier. His country was done with the war. His countrymen were all done with it. The facts were quite clear.
But Hiroo decided those pamphlets he found in 1945 were a trick.
And this narrative changed his life.
…Bizarre, indeed.
Narrative is more powerful than fact, folks. Narrative feeds the human heart the meaning it so desperately craves. We’re simply programmed this way. We’re programmed to be meaning-seekers by a divine Meaning-Maker.
By the one Genesis calls, Elohim. The one true, living Creator.
The moment Elohim made us in his image, mere existence became insufficient for us.
We’re not content believing that all this—this universe, these people inside it, this me that I am—is just some dispassionately spewn assortment of cosmic facts happening pointlessly inside time and space. We’re not content believing that God yawned, and the world was born.
No. We crave existence with meaning. With purpose. With hope. With love. With destiny.
That’s why, in designing us this way, Elohim also gave us a portion of himself: his own knack for making meaning from facts. In other words, for telling stories inside us about the things that happen outside us.
Narratives vs. Facts.
This storytelling ability is an important gift to manage—particularly when we suffer. Particularly when things like our job descriptions get obliterated by Covid.
It’s something we need to get good at.
Because here’s an inescapable two-fold reality:
1) Storytelling is a non-optional, automatic process.
2) Storytelling naturally turns into story-living.
I mean this:
Like it or not, when life gives you facts (no, not lemons, silly) you’re going to make a story with them, either on purpose or on accident. You can’t help it. Human hearts are programmed to do so. As life happens to us, especially in sufferings and hardships, we can’t help but interpret things emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Facts never remain just facts. They always become more than just the events they were. And if you don’t turn them into a narrative by faith, they’ll make themselves into one for you by using your wounded emotions.
And guess what: 100% of the time, when you allow the facts to set the narrative with your emotions, they (while functioning underneath the influence of a very real devil who oversees a very fallen world and manipulates very fallen human psyches) will consistently weave a narrative of doubt, bitterness, cynicism, rebellion, denial, lovelessness, and hopelessness. Then, like a virus, that dark narrative replicates itself again and again in your mind and your heart until it eventually dominates your inner world.
Then what’s in, comes out.
Viral narratives lead to viral behaviors, which lead to viral habits, which lead to viral consequences and viral strongholds.
We become what we think. Our thoughts are prophetic.
…Good gravy, I just said the words “stronghold” AND “prophetic.” Things just got Penetcostal-ish.
Well, forgive me if they did. This is a sensitive subject—for me especially, as someone who deals with anxiety and irrational negative thinking by default. Daily, I battle my emotions over who’s gonna be telling the mental narratives that day. It’s like battling for “cereal pick of the week” with your siblings, but much more consequential.
What’s most often at stake in the battle between facts and narrative is our heart’s perception of God’s character. This is no small thing. One way or another, our perception of God controls everything we do and everything we permit ourselves to become.
My boy, A.W. Tozer, stated it this way:
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us…
For this reason, the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself. And the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”
Who we become is a direct response to who we think God is.
…Circling back to where we started, our God-given ability to take facts and make a narrative from them is a weapon we use in our sufferings for either better or worse. The power of life and death isn’t just in our physical tongue. It’s also in our mental tongue. Depending on how we wield this weapon, our faith either marches toward resilience or drifts into decay.
So, for me:
The fact that Covid-19 happened this year and ruined a lot of things is beyond my control.
The fact that my job dramatically changed this year is beyond my control.
The fact that it was against my will is beyond my control.
The fact that quarantine management got seriously out of hand is beyond my control.
The fact that for three months straight—day and night, week and weekend—I swam in work that exclusively depressed and drained me is beyond my control.
The fact that I came to emotionally hate my job for a time is beyond my control. (Emotions are such disobedient creatures, aren’t they?)
But those are all just facts. As much as those facts affected me—causing pain and triggering anxiety and giving me lots of baggage to process—they’re still just things that happened. By themselves, they have no ability to create lasting meaning over me or in me. By themselves, they don’t control how I interpret things, the spiritual or psychological or behavioral habits I form in response to my interpretations, and the disciple I become through these habits.
That’s on me. That’s something I work with the Holy Spirit to do. That’s something I work with the Holy Scriptures to do. That’s something I work with Christ’s Bride to do.
How about one more bizarre story to close this out?
If you’re a churchgoer, you’ve probably sung this refrain before:
“It is well,
it is well,
with my soul.”
Comforting as this refrain is, its words were born in agony.
Horatio Spafford (1828 – 1888) was a prosperous American lawyer, husband, and father of five children—four daughters and one son. A resident of Chicago, Horatio invested heavily into business property in the northern Chicago area in the spring of 1871. Almost immediately following this investment, unspeakable tragedy claimed Horatio’s prosperity, and the man swiftly became a modern-day Job.
First in the line of traumas, Horatio’s four-year-old son dies. A tragedy which on its own is enough to produce immense grief. But more would soon follow.
After his son’s death, in October 1871 the Great Fire of Chicago immolates a significant portion of the city, burning to ash most of Spafford’s real estate investments, leaving him in financial ruin. The fire happens just months after Horatio made the investment.
Just two years later, still suffering in the wake of financial loss and the death of his son, Horatio sends his family on holiday to England where they planned to spend time with family friend, Dwight L. Moody. In a last-minute change of plans, Horatio delays his own departure, remaining behind to deal with looming business issues created by the Chicago inferno. He told his wife and four daughters that he’d join them in England as soon as he could.
Tragically, he’d never have the opportunity.
While sailing across the Atlantic, the steamship bearing Horatio’s wife and four daughters collides with another iron sea vessel in the early morning hours on November 22 and sinks violently. In a mere 12 minutes, all four of his daughters drown in the shipwreck. Only Anna, his stricken wife, survives to send him the now famous telegram which read:
“saved alone.
what shall I do?”
Then were born those words you and I’ve sung in church all these years.
Horatio immediately sailed for England to find Anna. As he sailed the cold, murderous Atlantic, the vessel’s captain called Horatio to the bridge where he informed him that they were passing by the very spot of his daughters’ death. Horatio went up and observed the place. Sometime after they passed by, Horatio put pen to paper and drew out from the cavernous depths of his own broken soul this now famous confession:
“When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well,
It is well with my soul.”
Brutal.
And,
Bizarre.
Life gave Horatio Spafford death and fire and shipwreck. A cruel world gave him cruel facts. But with near-unbelievable grit, Horatio took those facts and, while still wearing a shattered heart, penned a faith narrative so earnest and so inspiring the Christian world has been singing it ever since.
Horatio’s hymn and testimony convicts me of something I don’t like to acknowledge:
Things being well with my soul doesn’t have to hinge on whether all goes well with me.
Because how we respond to life more determines who we are than what happens to us in life.
And this isn’t fun. Knowing that, despite our suffering, we’re still responsible for who we become. It’s easier to remain life’s victim—its hapless and helpless passenger—than it is to rise and become its master.
But we are not alone.
Elohim, the Divine Storyteller and Meaning-Maker, beckons us to such mastery despite our frail frames. The Man of Sorrows, himself well-acquainted with grief, transfers to us his own power to make stories of faith, hope, and love—whether the facts are cruel or colorful. And the Spirit trains us in trial, even as he comforts us in suffering.
Dear friend and reader: You are more than what’s happened to you.
The baggage you’re carrying doesn’t have to own you.
You bear the signature of the Author who wrote you into existence. He’s made you a storyteller like himself. And what are those cruel facts but narrative ingredients at your disposal? Ingredients that a loving Father promises—not to always spare you from—but to always help you find meaning in.
I pray that when the facts you face threaten to consume you, and Covid life keeps stealing from you, you would not shrink back. No. I pray that you would wage war against the enemy who seeks to manipulate your perception of God. That you would transform cruel Facts into faith Narratives declaring God’s goodness and faithfulness over you and in you.
Because, while the world rages against you, the stories remain true:
His mercies are new every morning.
His love does not fail.
His kindness is everlasting.
His hope remains sure and steadfast.
And,
His goodness creates meaning through suffering.
