In what may come as a surprise to very few, the top ten riskiest jobs in terms of possible COVID-19 exposure are patient-facing roles in healthcare.
— Read on blog.healthjobsnationwide.com/10-healthcare-roles-top-riskiest-list/
Exodus 19:5 KJV
[5] Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine:
Deuteronomy 7:6 KJV
[6] For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.
Deuteronomy 14:2 KJV
[2] For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.
These three calling out verses are similar in many ways. God calls us. We are supposed to listen to His voice. If we do listen we are considered by Him (and often others) as special or peculiar.
Special sounds good, but peculiar can raise some eyebrows. Peculiar is different, not like the others, marked out.
We might not want all that, but it is what it means to be God’s treasure.
He tells us we are his valuable prizes, and we, as the valued prizes, do what he tells us to do,
No matter what
Genesis 43:23 KJV
[23] And he said, Peace be to you, fear not: your God, and the God of your father, hath given you treasure in your sacks: I had your money. And he brought Simeon out unto them.
Joseph was sold as a slave by his brothers. He was not their treasure. He was, at some point, so despised by them that they would have killed him. They went to great pains to get rid of him, and then let’s face it–life as a slave was no picnic for Joseph. He had so many days of servitude, imprisonment, and darkness. All because his brothers did not see he was treasure.
The similarity between Joseph and Jesus is strong and intentional. Many of us are like Joseph’s brothers, just trying to get Jesus out of the picture so we don’t have to deal with him, all while he has willingly taken on our enslavement, our imprisonments, our being left for dead.
And yet Joseph restores. He gives both life and treasure to his brothers when they had deprived him of his own
In the same way Jesus does, turning rejection into blessing the moment we realize
We can’t live without him.
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children
If only an ordinary person like me could
Cast a spell with words
Hocus pocus–live!
Abracadabra–live!
I alternate between believing
That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or
The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing
Calvariums.
I draw from memory, with sticks of charcoal, which smudges like the dickens! The figure has the messy edges of your ordinary unfinished sketch, work-in-progress, might-never-be-finished
Angel just means messenger and
We mortals are
from dust, and dust return,
Until such piercing Light
Outshines all
That came before.
I might as well be a canine companion
In this ritual of carefulness
Wash the shoes, spray them with bleach, stuff the scrubs into the drum of the machine, always use extra detergent
Spin out
Then dry on the line
Everything sanitized
In this intense, summer light
Prayer is like a huge dirigible, you can see the basket, but not the balloon or the weightless lift
God is the air, the world all around
Prayer is like a child standing in the tip of an iceberg, can’t see the ice beneath the water
God is all the ocean
One day we will see all
we cannot yet
A pastor told a story about a priest or monk whose brother was a fighter pilot. The pilot took his brother to the flight simulator. In the course of learning and crashing in a computerized model of flight, the non-pilot commented on the steep cost of learning to fly, the risks, and what happens when there is a crisis.
The pilot said, people train to a level and in a crisis they revert to that level–to what they know or have already mastered.
Rarely more.
We don’t rise to a higher level in a crisis. We revert to what we have trained for.
That is what the pilot said, I tell myself
When what we have trained for
Happens
When the older brother lifts his little brother up
So high in the air
above the dock, out into the deep river
Light scatters everywhere
And I think
You are my magical and amazing Older brother
Giving me, your little sister,
Flight
Carrying Light 