Today, at the hospital where I work, one of the largest in New York City, Covid-19 cases continue to climb, and there’s movement to redeploy as many health care workers as possible to the E.R.s, new “fever clinics” and I.C.U.s. It’s becoming an all-healthy-hands-on-deck scenario.

The sky is falling. I’m not afraid to say it. A few weeks from now you may call me an alarmist; and I can live with that. Actually, I will keel over with happiness if I’m proven wrong.

Alarmist is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me before. I’m a board-certified surgeon and critical care specialist who spent much of my training attending to traumas in the emergency room and doing the rounds at Harvard hospitals’ intensive care units. I’m now in my last four months of training as a pediatric surgeon in New York City. Part of my job entails waking in the middle of the night to rush to the children’s hospital to put babies on a form of life support called ECMO, a service required when a child’s lungs are failing even with maximum ventilator support. Scenarios that mimic end-stage Covid-19 are part of my job. Panic is not in my vocabulary; the emotion has been drilled out of me in nine years of training. This is different.

We are living in a global public health crisis moving at a speed and scale never witnessed by living generations. The cracks in our medical and financial systems are being splayed open like a gashing wound. No matter how this plays out, life will forever look a little different for all of us.

Read it all.

Opinion | A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling – The New York Times https://t.co/U9AsOzSUIo

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 19, 2020

We know from Scripture and experience that God acts differently when we pray. We believe that He not only hears our prayers, but that He uses people like our leaders, scientists, and medical professionals to accomplish His will. We pray that God would grant them wisdom, insight and strength in these coming days. We pray that in this time, people will call on Jesus in their pain, suffering and worries and find the rest and hope that only He can provide.
We call on Anglicans around the globe to join together in the Holy Spirit, in prayer and fasting this Sunday, 22 March 2020.

Let us pray and fast for our nations:

• repenting of our sins and asking God’s forgiveness
• asking God’s intervention to stop the spread of this virus
• asking God’s intervention to stop the locusts
• asking God for healing for those who are sick
• asking God for miraculous provision for the hungry
• asking God to use us, his people, as agents of love and compassion
• asking God to draw people to himself through the saving power of Jesus on the cross.

Read it all.

@ArchbishopFoley & Archbishop @benkwashi issue a call to prayer and fasting for this Sunday 22 March, interceding against the spread of COVID-19, swarming locusts in East Africa, the Middle East, Asia, famine & hunger in regions of Africa: https://t.co/xWIH4BalRw

— GAFCON (@gafconference) March 18, 2020

Holy Scripture, brethren, cries out to us, saying,
“Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled,
and he who humbles himself shall be exalted” (Luke 14:11).
In saying this it shows us
that all exaltation is a kind of pride,
against which the Prophet proves himself to be on guard
when he says,
“Lord, my heart is not exalted,
nor are mine eyes lifted up;
neither have I walked in great matters,
nor in wonders above me” (Ps. 130[131]:1)
But how has he acted?
“Rather have I been of humble mind
than exalting myself;
as a weaned child on its mother’s breast,
so You solace my soul” (Ps. 130[131]:2).

Hence, brethren,
if we wish to reach the very highest point of humility
and to arrive speedily at that heavenly exaltation
to which ascent is made through the humility of this present life,
we must
by our ascending actions
erect the ladder Jacob saw in his dream,
on which Angels appeared to him descending and ascending.
By that descent and ascent
we must surely understand nothing else than this,
that we descend by self-exaltation and ascend by humility.
And the ladder thus set up is our life in the world,
which the Lord raises up to heaven if our heart is humbled.
For we call our body and soul the sides of the ladder,
and into these sides our divine vocation has inserted
the different steps of humility and discipline we must climb.

–The Rule of Benedict, Chapter 7

Mar 21: Feast of Benedict of Nursia (c. †480); founder of Monte Cassino; #Europe‘s patron saint

[BL Arundel 155 f133 @britishlibrary https://t.co/Uy51SzUgLE] pic.twitter.com/6izqiNaPvy

— Peritia (@PeritiaEditors) March 21, 2020

Almighty and everlasting God, whose precepts are the wisdom of a loving Father: Give us grace, following the teaching and example of thy servant Benedict, to walk with loving and willing hearts in the school of the Lord’s service; let thine ears be open unto our prayers; and prosper with thy blessing the work of our hands; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today is the feast of Benedict of Nursia (d. c.543), the author of the famous Rule & effectively the founder of the Benedictine Order. In this bas-de-page from Valenciennes – BM – ms. 0838, f.072v (https://t.co/E6piK3dYKJ), we see Benedict giving his rule to the monks & nuns. pic.twitter.com/zpPa5FTG3H

— Steffen Hope (@HopeSteffen) March 21, 2020

O God, Who never forsakest those that hope in Thee: grant that we may ever keep that hope which Thou hast given us by Thy Word as an anchor of our souls, to preserve us sure and steadfast, unshaken and secure in all the storms of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God.

–Psalm 87:1-3