Hey, Life Church family. I am incredibly excited to preach to you today for the first time out of quarantine.

If you're kind of wondering like, you know, how are you having church when most places we're not really supposed to have church?

This is actually pre-recorded from earlier in the week and what I wanted to do is

record a message that could speak directly in to what is going on in the world. Now, I don't want to

pretend to be an expert in any sense of the word.

I cannot tell you what's going to happen to this virus. In fact, I don't think even those would call themselves experts could tell you what's going to happen.

But what I want to do is try to speak into the life of our church from a perspective of us who should have faith.

Before I kind of give you my thoughts, I want to try to tell you the story behind our quarantine because I haven't talked a lot about it.

And you're my church family, and I just want to share it with you.

If you haven't been here and you don't know the story, Pastor Bobby Grunwald and I flew to Germany a little over two and a half weeks ago to teach at a leadership conference.

If you can imagine there were about 15,000 people at this conference.

There were 7300 at our location where we were broadcasting from.

At that time, there was only maybe 30 or no more than 40 people that had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Unfortunately, one of those people happened to be at the conference.

So Bobby and I went to a private small dinner with 14 people the night before the event started.

We gathered with the other speakers.

And in the next morning, I did the opening session teaching on leadership.

Then Bobby and I ended up flying back and it boarded our flight.

And we were midway back to our connecting flight in Chicago when we turned on Wi-Fi and got the very bad news that one of the speakers, one of the 14 people that we had dinner with, actually tested positive for the virus.

So we immediately told the flight attendant who notified the pilot and they moved people out of our section.

And they looked very, very angry with us.

And now I know what it's like to be a leper.

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