Originally Published 2020.09.01. Although originally published eleven months ago, it is just as relevant, or more, today.
…do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
2 Peter 3:8
Happy September 2020 everybody.
Whoa…that sounds strange to say!
We have now been under the COVID-umbrella for five months and fifteen days. We have not had a normal Friday since Friday the 13th (of March!). It seems like such a long time ago.
It is like we are trapped in the space-time continuum, and days seem like weeks, and weeks seem like months. Easter was four months ago, yet it seems like it was a year ago. We are in this disorienting liminal space where we forget the date or day of the week, and each day brings new challenges (or old ones).
Last week I was on a ZOOM meeting, and a colleague asked if anybody else was experiencing that a day in the pandemic life can contain four different days. You start the day fine, getting a ton of work done. Then something (or someone) happens later in the morning that throws everything off. By mid-afternoon, the crisis may have abated, and you finally begin to breathe again. Then later in the day, darkness begins to fall, and maybe another problem. Then, you go to bed and the next “four days” dawns!
My friends, this is the COVID-coaster, and we are caught in its space-time continuum!
Last Sunday, I reminded the FPC Sparta family that we are on an “expotition” in the Hundred Acre Wood with our guide, CHRISTopher Robin. We are disoriented and unsure where we are going as we search for the North Pole, our true North. But if we walk by faith and not by sight, knowing that “42” is with us on the journey, we will come out of this liminal space re-oriented and possessing a new identity that includes our time together on the expotition.
The Pandemic, Election, and Social Issues are our Spanish Flu, Great Depression, and WWII all wrapped into one. It will become part of our identity and social DNA, and people in the future will look back on this time trying to figure out what it was like to live through it.
Let’s show the future that many of us were faithful, loving, kind, merciful, and selfless toward others. Because that was supposed to be our identity before the COVID, during the COVID, and after the COVID.
SEARCHING FOR 42 