I love the song, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”
I especially like the verse that says, “Here I raise my Ebenezer.” I love the original text, but I know it can be confusing for those of us who love Christmas Carol and are going to be distracted thinking about Ebenezer Scrooge instead of the Bible context of this verse.
So I also like the way that modern hymnals sometimes change it: “Here I raise my sign of victory, hither by thy help I’m come.”
Let’s look at the passage that this phrase comes from:
12 Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, “Till now the Lord has helped us.”
1 Samuel 7:12
I don’t know how closely you followed the news about the Shanghai lockdown that happened back in March 2022. Three days ago was the anniversary of the day that started my family’s 95-day lockdown inside the campus of the university where we lived. We couldn’t leave our campus for over 3 months. Shanghai is a city of 25 million people. (Just to put that into context, Canada’s entire population is 37 million people.) Shanghai’s 25 million people were told that they couldn’t even leave their apartments. Most of our friends had no way to take walks and barely saw the sun during that time.
I haven’t written much about these events, but at this anniversary, I want to write about how God used these events to completely change our lives, and I want to raise my own Ebenezer—my own sign of victory—and say, “Till now the LORD has helped us.”
This whole journey starts with Psalm 46:
1 God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah8 Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Psalm 46
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
On March 4, my oldest son, who was in fifth grade at the time and attended the local Chinese primary school, had to stay back at his school suddenly in order to be part of mass COVID testing they were doing because of a student there whose mother had a friend who tested positive. That’s right—a friend of this student’s mom tested positive, and that triggered the school keeping every student back until they could all be tested. In the middle of the day, we were notified that this was going to happen, and we had to just wait until we got a message that we could come pick him up. At 8pm, we were finally able to get him, and I was so thankful we were able to pick him up because by that point I had discovered that earlier that week other schools had done similar things, and some had been forced to keep kids at the school overnight.
When you live in China, you understand that things can happen suddenly without warning, but policies had never caused us to be separated from our kids before. These new changes caused us to run to God as our refuge and strength like never before.
The following week, he had to be tested about 5 times total, and toward the end of the next week, our other son, who was five at the time, had the same thing happen at his kindergarten. After all of the kids were finally tested, his kindergarten bus brought him home around 10pm that night. And that was actually his last day at kindergarten—because of the lockdown they ended up cancelling school the rest of the semester.
So this was our introduction to lockdown, and it honestly helped me just to be thankful that we were all able to be together. The school we lived and worked in, being a medical university, was extremely interested in keeping their student population COVID-free, and so they ended up going into lockdown mode on March 14, about 2 weeks before the entire city went into lockdown.
We heard stories of parents and children being separated. If a child tested positive while the parents were still negative, at the beginning, they were taking just the child away to special quarantine hospitals. The same would happen if parents tested positive while a child was still negative. As a mom, these were the scariest moments of lockdown.
Praise God that didn’t last long. By mid-April the policies changed to allow parents and children to stay together, but the reality of being suddenly taken away to a quarantine center was always there.
We saw many, many images and heard many stories of people being taken to mass quarantine centers, where they had to stay until they tested negative again. These places had thousands of beds in huge, open rooms. I read about the conditions of those places, and I tried to prepare. I packed emergency quarantine backpacks for each family member. They included shampoo, soap to wash clothes, snacks, headphones, a blanket, and one change of clothes. My bag also included lots of instant coffee!
These bags represented the extent to which I could prepare and control possible future events.
I couldn’t do anything else. I couldn’t leave my home or force policy changes.
The only powerful thing I could do was pray.
I cannot tell you how helpful Psalm 46 is in times like these! Just read this out loud:
2 God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
…
10 “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
This psalm tells me that I can sing to God and cry out to Him in these circumstances. I can trust that He really is a help, and that He is in control. I can be still and know that He is God and He will be exalted among the nations.
Back in 2020, when we were first separated from friends and family because of the pandemic and first started to live in these uncertain times, my husband and I held a zoom prayer meeting every morning. We started by first reading Psalm 46 together with whoever was in the prayer meeting that day, and then we’d just go directly into prayer. We did that for months.
That practice paved the way for me to keep going back to Psalm 46 during the 2023 lockdown, and trust God for the future.
Looking at examples in the Bible helped teach me how to respond.
One story in the Bible that I kept meditating on was the story of Joseph. I might have been in lockdown, but Joseph was enslaved and imprisoned in a foreign country.
When I looked at his willingness to forgive those who caused him to be in that situation—how he forgave their murderous betrayal—I saw how could forgive those who caused my suffering because of their fears and desire to contain and control.
When I looked at Joseph’s immense trust in the God of his fathers, his belief that he wasn’t abandoned and was still part of God’s plan, I could trust God with the lives of my family members and continue ministering in whatever small ways were still available to me.
I also meditated a lot on the children of Israel in the wilderness. They were in a time of immense waiting, and they were tempted to complain about things like food and safety.
It helped me to realize that when I complain or worry about food, even in times of lockdown, I am complaining against God’s provision, and not trusting Him to supply my needs.
This idea was humorously reinforced by the fact that because we lived inside our college campus and were unable to get food easily from the outside, most of our meals during lockdown came from our school’s cafeteria. As you can imagine, their cooking style was oily and unfamiliar, and could lead to stomach discomfort. We often would go to the cafeteria counter, look for the most recognizable dishes, and if we couldn’t find anything we knew, we’d point to a dish and ask, “这是什么??” (zhe shi shenme) which in Chinese means, “What is it?”
If the children of Israel had spoken Chinese, manna would have been called 这是什么? I realized that this food from the cafeteria was very much our version of manna. It was the food that God was using each and every day to make sure that we didn’t go hungry. And even though we looked at it and said “What is it?” we had to see it for the miraculous provision that it was! So many people had difficulty getting food during the lockdown in SH, but we had hot meals available to us each and every day!
These lessons were also so helpful as we learned more about what the future might hold.
On April 15, we learned that my mother-in-law, Debbie Talbert, had pancreatic cancer. As devastating as that diagnosis was, we knew that God was going to take care of all of us, and that He had a plan. We thanked Him for showing us so clearly that it was time to come back to North America.
We’d spent 15 years in China, and we had not planned on leaving when the doors were still very much closed for returning. But God showed us step by step what He wanted us to do, and we trusted Him because He is our refuge and our strength and a very present help in time of trouble.
I hope to never be involved in the tragic lockdown of an entire city ever again.
However, I have to recognize and praise God for how He used it for good in our lives. He used it to change us, to cause us to run to Him. It makes me see more clearly just how the apostle Paul can say,
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Romans 8:18
Although my family has suffered many losses this past year, we have not lost our God, and He is a mighty protector and provider. I want to praise and thank Him for His constant grace and goodness.
Till now the Lord has helped us. He is our refuge and strength.
Suggested Reading:
“How People Change targets the root of a person: the heart. When our core desires and motivations change, only then will behavior follow. Using a biblical model of Heat, Thorns, Cross, and Fruit, Paul David Tripp and Timothy S. Lane reveal how lasting change is possible.” (Amazon description)
365 Gospel-Centered Devotions for the Whole Year
“Mornings can be tough. Sometimes, a hearty breakfast and strong cup of coffee just aren’t enough. Offering more than a rush of caffeine, best-selling author Paul David Tripp wants to energize you with the most potent encouragement imaginable: the gospel.” (Amazon description)
“For over 40 years, J. I. Packer’s classic has been an important tool to help Christians around the world discover the wonder, the glory and the joy of knowing God. In 2006, Christianity Today voted this title one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals, and this 20th anniversary edition is updated with a new preface by the author.” (Amazon description)
