A friend who lives in another state told me–
She drives by a pharmacy in her town and recently noticed a shiny new BMW with a personalized license plate which read COVID parked there each day during business hours.
No one should celebrate the economic boost caused by the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans.
Matthew 13:38-39 KJV
[38] The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one ; [39] The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.
When I was younger I would read Catcher in the Rye on a yearly basis. First I was Phoebe’s age, then Holden’s and now I am old enough to know that the narrator sounds too much like a middle aged man with a Peter Pan complex.
But the catchers in the rye are older than me and J.D.
They are the injunction of a God who saves us all from the precipice hill of Golgotha. He tells me I owe him all and I agree. He tells me, come with me into the fields
And I go
I try to go
At times I go back and parse
The pain, the bone-deep ache
The fever, chills, fatigue
The way it felt like constant, relentless muggings committed by tiny, unseen assailants
No hunger
A brief sense of being untied from all ordinary things
As though powerlessness could be construed as
Super-heroic
At first I thought it was my age, that some magic threshold of peri-menopausal bliss had been breached and entered and that the clumps of hair went with the hot flashes and wrinkles. Then a survivor 20 years my junior told me she was struggling with hair loss and it occurred to me that perhaps it was one more Covid peculiarity?
I think I am handling it well. I have trimmed the remaining locks by inches and let its spun lightness rule the day.
I am alive
He walks into every room looking for someone who might comprehend
what it is
he has seen and heard
He weighs their solemn waiting-room-faces
Do they have
Better memories now? Do they still need to write things down or
Know every word by heart?
Are all the lambs among them and
can we see their scars?
Who can end this waiting
By calling us out
Out into life
Around Thanksgiving I got Covid. I work in a doctor’s office, so eventually all of our staff got the disease as did our immediate family.
Symptoms and severity sorted out by age. The youngest two had the mildest symptoms, the oldest–me, ended up in the ER for a day, facing a diagnosis of damage to my heart and lungs.
First, let me say, that I am mending. I am the recipient of miracles and healing.
But the 24 hours leading up to the ER visit were really scary. The day in the ER was a gift. The oxygen machine they sent me home with was a gift.
And my current pulse, O2 stats, and general health–belong to the grace of my Ransomer.
Jesus gave me miracles, as He has done my whole life.
Covid is a really scary disease. It leaves some scars. It leaves fear and memory of the pain and uncertainty.
But Jesus is bigger than mountains. Jesus is bigger than tiny killer viral agents.
And Jesus never walks away from us.
I know I have been saved and given the gift of my life back.
I will do what I can to praise the One who saved me.
And I will use these beautiful lungs to pray for all of us.
That we feel him there with us,
No matter what.
I have never been a roller coaster girl. Too queasy, but these days the ride is all mental grit and actuarial tables–I stop in the credit union parking lot just as the preacher on the radio quotes Jesus–ask anything in my name and I will give it to you!
Ok, God, I tell Him, make those doctors brave
Could substitute kind, generous, humble, compassionate
Feels impossible, I tell Him then
He reminds me
Impossible
Is His specialty.
I read this article today about how a hospital in Texas is deciding to handle rising numbers of Covid patients.
The entire article is alarming, but one thing struck me–thousands of miles away?
The entire state of Texas is not thousands of miles across from end to end any way you look at it.
While there are far-reaching and devastating consequences for everyone involved when people in need of care are summarily left to die and refused care,
I am also not sure how I feel about being told that there is not one place in Texas that will take very sick patients, the fragile and the dying.
Maybe we need to talk about that.
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/
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