Max Lucado on COVID-19 Pandemic: 'What Appears to Be Evil, God's Going to Use for Good'

"This isn't the April any of us wanted," wrote author and pastor Max Lucado in a recent essay titled, "Surviving April."

"We wanted spring training. We wanted to go to church on Easter Sunday. We wanted a weekend trip to see the spring flowers," he wrote.

However, as the Blue Bonnets bloom in his home state of Texas, he tells CBN News, "This year we were slammed with a second winter."

As he reads the prayer requests people post on his social media channels, he says it feels like grief.

"When I look in my own heart, it feels like grief," he revealed.

"At its core grief is an unmet expectation. We expected to have more time with our loved ones. We expected to grow old with our wife. We expected to be healthy and so when people are grieving some expectation of life has gone unmet and that's really what we're dealing with here," Lucado explained.

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Many families are struggling to educate their children and work from home while managing the stress of an uncertain financial future and fears of poor health.

Lucado suggests people give themselves time to grieve.

"Give yourself a good meltdown - just let it go. Air your complaint before God, talk to him honestly, get on your knees, get on your belly," he said.

He also urges families to listen to one another since everyone processes disaster differently.

And still, as people bid farewell to the sense of safety that they've come to expect, Lucado says there is great hope.

"The Bible is a story of how God gets people through things. It's a story of deliverance," he noted.

"Of course, the great story is the story of Easter. How Good Friday, the darkest day of humanity, becomes the greatest Sunday of celebration because God got humanity through the crisis. The greatest coronavirus of the soul and that is sin," he added.

As we prepare to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, Lucado said, he's thankful we live in a time with a technological solution to churches having to close their doors.

"What will happen is millions of people more will tune in and log in to watch an Easter service that would not have. Already in our church, and I'm hearing this from all over the country, the people watching online are two and three times the number of people who used to attend plus watch online. I know that ours is twice what it used to be," he told CBN News. 

He calls this a defining moment for the church.

"A time to give encouragement, a time for us to share the Gospel. A time for us to tell people that God is in control.  To remind people that yeah, this is a wakeup call for the whole planet. We've all been reminded of the brevity of life, the frailty of health. We need a God and thank God he's there," Lucado shared. 

"What appears to be evil, God's going to use for good," he said. "We're going to get through it. Weeping may come in the night, but joy comes in the morning."