When the plague struck Wittenberg, Germany, in 1527, people wrote to Martin Luther, asking his advice about what to do. In particular, he was asked whether it was right to run away from the plague.

Luther said it depended.

On what?

On who you are. What role do you have in life?

Whether or not it was right to run depended on your vocation.

Crisis situations do not suspend your obligation to love your neighbors—they emphasize the need to love. In fact, they are tests of love! And your roles in life (your vocations) will tell you whom to love and how to love them.

So, for example, when a house is on fire, it makes a big difference whether you’re a little girl or an on-duty firefighter—the little girl has a duty to run away from the fire and save her life, while the firefighter has a duty to stay and fight it, because that’s his role.

Likewise, in times of epidemics, your roles will help tell you what obligations you have to your neighbors:

Let everyone who has an obligation to a wife, brother, child, sister, or neighbor stay here to help and minister in the common peril. Each one of us owes it to his neighbor to be ready to lay down his own life. Even so, as your pastor and substitute preacher, I am bound to remain in my pulpit. A hundred pestilences will not drive me from it. Moreover, together with my deacons I am ready to visit the sick. If we die while engaged in this work of love, it will be well with us, for the hour of death will be sweeter to us than a hundred thousand years of life. On the other hand, if you flee with a bad conscience, the time will come when you would a thousand times rather have died” (Letters, 248).

Only God knows what will happen with the coronavirus. It might get much worse, before it gets better. But despite all the unknowns, at least one thing is for certain—there will be suffering people who will need your help (i.e., your love). Whether it is a friend who needs an extra roll of toilet paper, or a family who needs help with babysitting while school is suspended, or someone who has become infected who needs you to go grocery shopping for him or her…there will be many needs to meet, and in some cases, God will place you to meet them. That’s the royal law.

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well (James 2:8).

I pray that God protects you and yours during this time. But you don’t need to feel well to do well.