I feel as if I am reading about past history when I read the news. In a book somewhere and sometime in the future--maybe taking an exam and reciting numbers and accumulated fatalities. The number of Americans who desperately needed mental health service during and after the pandemic. The funerals that eventually took place without bodies. Pictures of grocery stores without toilet paper, empty streets, refrigerated vans in NYC claiming bodies that loved ones could not touch.
I don’t know about you, but I never wanted to be a part of history reported in a textbook, but here I am reading about myself, my country, the world, long after the event, wondering how this could have happened. It is, in some ways, parallel to the 9/11 terrorist attack on NYC and DC. I recall watching the towers collapsing again and again and again with a desperate, almost obsessive need to pound its reality into my consciousness.
Even now, I wonder if it was real. This may be how I feel years from now about this horrible pandemic.
So much of life is about perspective. If we could extract ourselves from the food lines and see the world historically, we would see things differently, maybe a bit closer to how God sees this event. We certainly did not expect anything like this in our lifetime, but really, it is nothing new. And God still wants to use it to grow us into the person God created us to be. I, along with you, am listening for God’s voice in me, sharing with me how I can surrender to something I have no control over and become a better person in the middle of it...
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