Spring 2020. This is a time that will forever live on in our minds and the minds of our children as a difficult, yet wonderful time. A time of reconnecting and getting to spend more time with our families than any other time in our lives.
We will look back, and we will miss this time.
From my perspective as a work-from-home introvert, having my family home and our pace of life slow down has been amazing. We’ve gone from having just a few precious nights a week at home, to every night at home. We’ve drawn closer to our children and had more time to focus on spending time with them. We’ve gotten to work on those “some day” projects that never seem to come. But I know my experience of this time is not the same as everyone else. There are so many who are working long hours, such as medical workers, those working at grocery stores, delivery services, and the list goes on and on. There are in fact many who are afraid, hurting, struggling and can’t wait to get back to whatever “normal” life looked like before. I totally get that.
But I believe though this time is hard, that it’s created a fundamental shift, a tear in our collective consciousness about what’s important. When you look at celebrities, they are at home in quarantine, the same as us. They have lost the elevated status they once had. For most churches, it’s forced them to answer the question, without a building, what is the church? Throughout our culture, businesses have stepped up to offer assistance to those in desperate need and neighbors are reaching out to support those around them. Though talk of this virus often dominates our conversations, there still seems to be a “grace” we offer to each other in the midst of this unprecedented time.
As life has slowed down I feel we are starting to come out of a fog. Our life has just had a big PAUSE button hit, and we are left asking ourselves, what really is important? Is what we are chasing after really what we are called to do?
For myself, it has meant to stop putting off starting a calling the Lord gave me. That is this channel. What about you? When the risk of this virus subsides and things begin to go back to normal, do you really want to go back to the way things were? How is it that you will be different?