Right after 9/11, my big sister Lauretta, who’s a psychologist — a licensed psychotherapist — shared great advice. “Turn off the news.” No, don’t bury your head in the sand. She wasn’t saying that. But stop obsessing — about the tragedy, the deaths, collapsed buildings, downed airplanes, all of it.

And you know where this is going. As the world battles the COVID-19 outbreak, where will we put our trust? On the nonstop news, with those crawl lines rolling ad infinitum under every broadcast?

Or will we put our trust in God?

“He’s your Guardian,” says Psalm 121 — and to that promise we cling tight. But will God save us? Will God help us?

IS HE ENOUGH?

Such questions aren’t academic, not now, especially if you grew up — as Lauretta and I did (and some of you) — before vaccines for dreaded diseases: polio, measles, chicken pox, mumps. They raged through a neighborhood or school like fire.

As sisters, we both came down with all of these scourges except polio. But my husband, during his childhood, watched close friend and neighbor Henry (filmmaker Henry Hampton) contract polio, leaving Henry with a severe limp on one side of his body for the rest of his life.

YET HE STILL GUARDS

Dan got a powerful gamma globulin shot to boost his immunity — so massive it temporarily knocked him flat.

But what did God do? He guarded. He watched over. And He still watches. “Before I even knew Him,” Dan now declares, “He was watching.”

I reflect on God’s guardianship today, thinking not just about Dan — and Lauretta, Henry, me and our generation — but about Charles Spurgeon, the 19th Century British evangelist. During London’s great cholera epidemic of 1854, Spurgeon ground himself to despair serving the sick, dying, and grief stricken while pastoring his overwhelmed congregation. As he said:

“All day, and sometimes all night long, I went about from house to house, and saw men and women dying, and, oh, how glad they were to see my face!”

But finally physically and mentally exhausted, he felt “that my burden was heavier than I could bear, and I was ready to sink under it.”

NO PLAGUE SHALL COME NIGH

Dragging himself home after yet another funeral, he noticed, “as God would have it,” a humble paper pasted in a shoemaker’s window, written in “bold good handwriting” with these words:

“Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”

Yes, strong words from another psalm — this one Psalm 91.

GOD STANDS GUARD

Reading it, a bell went off. Cholera killed 23,000 people in Great Britain in 1854. As it raged, however, what it didn’t afflict was Spurgeon’s mind. God stood guard there, protecting Spurgeon’s thinking — giving him the mind of Christ.

And, thus, protecting his faith.

(Clear thinking also inspired London physician John Snow to connect cholera to contaminated water. As soon as he convinced a London local council to remove the handle from a pump in Soho, the deadly epidemic there ended immediately.)

As The Message Bible declares:

“God’s your guardian.” He is “right at your side to protect you…God guards you from every evil, he guards your very life.”