Coronavirus: It will reveal our true character

In the past twenty-four hours, the impact of the Coronavirus upon life in America accelerated greatly:  The NBA is on hiatus (with other sports and entertainment events soon to follow), colleges are sending students home (primary schools will be next), and as expected the stock market is in free fall.  At this point, certainty about the eventual impact upon both lives lost and the global economy is impossible.  It will be significant, it will last a while, people will lose their jobs, and some their lives.  This is not the first time that a global pandemic has brought life to a halt, with the 1918 Influenza Pandemic as the worst example in modern history.  This pandemic will not result in a Mad Max style apocalypse, but it will have a significant impact, no matter what precautions are put in place.
The question today is this: What will this crisis reveal about our character?  Will it showcase our xenophobia, our greed, and our callousness to the potential harm of others, or will it remind us that we all live on the same planet, that resources are not our possession but gifts from God, and that our proper response to the needs of others is compassion?  In other words, will be respond to this crisis with good or evil?  In our everyday lives we face opportunities to choose to act in selfless righteousness, and opportunities to act in selfish immorality.  These are only made more acute and more consequential during a crisis.  Who you truly are is revealed when pressure is applied.  To whom you owe allegiance is made manifest when tough choices need to be made.
For Christians, the answer to this crisis is simple: continue to embrace righteous living and reject immorality, continue to serve others, continue to place your faith and hope in the Lord, continue to pray.  We as a Christian community fail to fully live up to this standard when times are easy, we are not an unvarnished reflection of our Savior, and for this we are rightly criticized and must repent.  A crisis like this will propel some Christians to extraordinary acts of bravery and charity, and it will reveal the deficiencies in the character of other Christians.  Every crisis is an opportunity to rise to the occasion, in the weeks and months ahead the world will be watching to see how the people of God react; for the sake of the Gospel, we must, by the grace of God and through the power of the Spirit, reveal ourselves to be true disciples of Jesus Christ in word and in deed.
In the Gospels, the repeated response of Jesus to the need of individuals and large crowds is compassion (Matthew 9:36, 14:14, 15:32, 20:34; Mark 6:34, 8:2; Luke 15:20).  In each case that compassion leads to action.  What actions we can take, as a Christian community, to help during this public health crisis are not yet clear, but they will be.  The opportunity to help will arise, we must be ready and willing.