“I’ve got a cupboard with cans of food, filtered water and pictures of you, and I’m not coming out until this is all over.”

These lyrics from the Postal Service, an early 2000s indie pop band, were about an imagined nuclear apocalypse. They now sound eerily familiar to those of us in coronavirus lockdown. Another line goes, “I wanted to walk through the empty streets, and feel something constant under my feet, but all the news reports recommended that I stay indoors.”

I thought back to that song (called “We Will Become Silhouettes”) when I recently heard the band’s frontman, Ben Gibbard, performing from quarantine in the Seattle area. During a time when everything about the coronavirus has been deemed “unprecedented”—a public health crisis, social crisis, and financial crisis like none of us have ever seen—it’s strangely fascinating to come across words that echo our current predicament.

I listened to an interview with the zombie-novel writer Max Brooks about how he studied pandemics and government responses while writing World War Z. His fictional zombie virus originated in China, which he identified as the perfect intersection of population concentration, high-speed travel, and authoritarian government suppression to fuel an outbreak. “I didn't so much pick China as China picked itself,” Brooks said.

Entertainment sites are releasing lists of the best pandemic movies, and The New York Times ran a piece by the game designer who creative the cooperative board game called Pandemic. It’s not merely a ploy for relevancy or timeliness. I think for some of us, these elements of pop culture that suddenly hit close to home can offer sense of direction or resolution in our real-life crisis. Perhaps there is a method to this madness. Maybe there is a path to make it through.

It’s easy to feel lost when everyone keeps saying that nothing like this has happened in our lifetimes or designating certain developments as “the worst” or “for the first time in history.” But we see familiar glimpses in Scripture too, of people overwhelmed by historic circumstances, and crying out, “How long, O Lord?”

“If the prophets of the Old Testament have anything to teach us, it’s that precisely in the darkest moments of our history, we need divinely inspired and freshly articulated hope,” wrote Esau McCaulley, a Wheaton College professor.

I am grateful that my church had been studying the minor prophets for the past several months. Despite learning more about the context for each, all the threats and political enemies and struggles and suffering in exile, I don’t think I understood what it was like to have that kind of desperation on a societal, country-wide scale until the past few weeks, as the outbreak has taken off in the US. The scope of the crisis has made me look back at books like Habukkuk and Joel.

The Lord urges his people to rend their hearts and not their garments (Joel 2:13) and promises that out of the calamity they experience he will bring great restoration. He does not merely promise an end to the plague of locusts that has overwhelmed them, but promises to “repay you for the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25).

We may have never endured a global pandemic in our lifetime, and we may not know how to grapple with the loss of life and means and connections, but we do know of a mighty God who redeems beyond what we expect or deserve. So in the midst of the madness, I see familiarity in those little Old Testament books, and I pray for God to repay us for the weeks, months, and years this virus will steal.

Kate