Hello to Bridgetown Church.

All of you watching online. I'm John Markoma.

And I'm Bethany Allen.

Welcome to the teaching portion of Bridgetown Church Online.

Please turn in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5.

In April of 1959, then Senator John F. Kennedy made a famous speech on the danger of Cold War with Russia and the threat of nuclear holocaust,

which at the time was brand new and really scary.

In it, he said that, quote, when written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters.

One represents danger and one represents opportunity.

President Kennedy's trope has since been reused by everybody from Condoleezza Rice to Al Gore.

Now, I did a little digging and I'm sad to say Kennedy was wrong on his translation of the Mandarin word wajee.

The idea of opportunity is not really in there.

But I think the point he made was right. In a crisis, there is a danger, but there is also an opportunity.

One journalist in an article from Medium coined a new English word opices as in like opportunity.

I doubt that will catch on.

Not good.

And crisis. But there is no doubt. We are facing a crisis in our city and our state and our nation and all across the world with the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the question for us as followers of Jesus is, what is the opportunity?

And I don't mean that in an opportunistic sense. I'm really wary of that.

A lot of people are about to get rich and exploit the vulnerability of so many people.

And I don't mean that in the sense of, you know, every cloud has a silver lining.

Though I'm sure there is truth in that.

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