What would you do with the end of “normal?”

In the early months of 2021 I formulated a plan based on the return of my life to me. I had almost died of Covid and had spent some time tethered to an oxygen machine.

I decided I should move slowly—literally. I felt like there was a sense of my own human fragility that had to be acknowledged—drive carefully, walk carefully, acknowledge the fog of your recovery.

Give some stuff away. I am a thrift store shopper and I tend to hold on to clothes. I went through several bags of clothes and was able to give them away with the acknowledgment that I had survived something and did not need that dress or that shirt in my new chapter.

Use the gift of a life given back for something. We took in our adopted granddaughters, whose lives have been pretty traumatic. I told myself—if I have been given more time, I need to use the time for brave things. That is not the easiest decision to make when your brave decision changes the lives of your entire family. But I can’t imagine my life without my granddaughters now.

I feel like we are all on the edge of change. Economies are brittle, wars are on horizons. Have we even really recovered from the trauma of a pandemic?

What would you do if today or tomorrow or Sunday was the last day of “normal?”

John 13

The dress rehearsal

Towards the beginning of the pandemic a man in our town died. He was young and his death sent a ripple of fear and disbelief through our community.

We stood on his widow’s driveway in the sunshine as she told us about the progress of his disease and swift death. It was as terrifying as the plague.

Eventually so many others died.

I was nearly one of them. After my life was given back to me, I told God I would always give Him credit for the miracle of my life returned.

I was surprised at how few of my extended family and friends seemed to believe me. It was shock? Or the fact that the recovery seemed commonplace to them?

It also troubled me that at least one of my friends thought that if I could survive it, so would she.

And she did not.

I carry her mistake with me. I feel her absence still, with all the others we have lost.

People have been telling us about their rapture dreams. “Rapture,” in this case is a shortened term for God taking a bunch of us home, ending the age of Grace.

Back in 2020 it felt like watching a tsunami rolling towards us on the horizon.

Jesus is coming soon. Find him. Buy oil for your lamp. It is minutes to midnight.

Matthew 25:6 NIV
[6] “At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’

The Creepy Sports Car

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.

We are the catchers in the rye

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

Briefly Superheroic

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

Shedding

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

Lazarus

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

My Covid Story

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.

Woman Up!

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.