Recently I was viewing video recordings from a pastor’s conference that took place in Hawaii. The conference happened just a few days earlier and the church that hosted the conference posted all the videos on their website.

After watching a few of the videos of the speakers I turned to a video titled “Q&A Panel.” The video of the Q&A Panel seemed to have been recorded in a gym with about seven pastors elevated on a platform receiving questions from the pastors sitting before them in the audience.

Somehow the final question of this hour-long Q&A Panel session energized one of the pastors on the platform to launch into a long and drawn-out rant against COVID-19 vaccinations and every person in government, medicine, and society that he deemed as part of a global plot to depopulate the earth.

Most of this pastor’s bitter verbal attack against the COVID-19 vaccine, healthcare workers, and civil leaders were statements and statistics that I have heard before from other anti-vax advocates, mostly as shared on social media posts and by “experts” on YouTube.

Listening to this pastor and his diatribe was very uncomfortable for me and I kept wondering what the other pastors on the platform and in the audience were thinking. At one point I thought to myself that this guy’s obsession has got be robbing him of the joy of the Lord, because it was robbing me and I wasn’t even there in person.

There were several times in his rant where he yelled at the audience, “I’ve done my research and you haven’t” and that “we need to know these things and be ready because they are going to get us.”

Finally the moderator was able to bring it all to its end, then he asked the pastors in the audience to make their way to the sanctuary for the next session. It was in that moment that one of the pastor’s on the other end of platform spoke up.

The pastor that spoke up said, “I want to mention that we are all going to find loads of competing information available to us on the internet, but let me encourage you to trust what the medical professionals are reporting in your local area.”

With that interjection, the moderator again asked everyone to make their way to the next session in the sanctuary.

I didn’t watch anymore videos of the conference after that, but I did sit there thinking about what the pastor who spoke up said. I have found that true for us in the Upper Gulf Coast area. What the local medical community is reporting here is not the same as what “experts” are reporting through YouTube channels from different parts of the country.

An example of this was a few weeks ago there was a graphic making its rounds on social media that listed stats claiming that only those who were previously vaccinated against COVID-19 are being hospitalized in this new wave. The graphic cited its stats as being from a hospital in Massachusetts.

At the same time, our local hospitals were reporting the exact opposite, in that 90% plus of those hospitalized in this delta variant wave are those who are not vaccinated. Yesterday on our local newscast there was an interview with a pulmonologist with Infirmary Healthcare who stated that everyone of his patients who have had to be intubated were not vaccinated.

Part of the pastor’s rant at the conference was that the COVID-19 vaccines are really a bio-weapon given to kill off an over populated earth. Between this pastor and other YouTube experts with social media medical training, I think they have gone from conspiracy theory to paranoia.

I think they are part of the Luke 21:26 condition spoken of by Jesus in that “Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.” The NIV puts it this way, “apprehensive of what is coming on the world.”

To you I say, please don’t obsess with the winds and the waves, but keep your focus on the Lord Jesus Christ.