Where are we?
January comes cold and bright where I live. While the frigid, bleak days of winter have a familiarity to them. The New Year finds me stumbling, trying to make sense of what happened over the past year. As we’ve walked through trauma and loss on a generational scale, maybe you, like me have been only able to make it through day by day. Now that we’ve wrapped up the year, I am trying to make some sense of it from a wider perspective.
In some ways I feel like I’ve been spit up on a beach by a proverbial whale. My ordered life seems to have been flung out and upended by world events, the isolation, and the unending anxiety of this Covid season. The personal health crisis’ that assailed us in the midst of this wider less intimate storm, have added significant vulnerability. It has all left me a bit breathless.
And yet, here we are. Recently I spoke with a friend who listened wide eyed to my description of where this year had brought us. She replied , “I don’t think I could do this.” “Yeah, me too!” I chuckled to think that there was an option, not to deal with the reality of our life now. There is no drop down menu to select the one I long for. Instead, I find myself scrambling to make sense of the life I have.
The New Year brings with it both tender hope and stark fear. Keith’s lung surgery last summer makes him extra vulnerable to the virus raging in our community and the wider world. There is a vaccine coming… We hope. We pray. We wait.
As we’ve walked this twisting and broken path, we’ve found that many of the things we’ve come to count upon have been unavailable to us this year. Gatherings that wrap around the pain and bring encouragement and hope have been cancelled. The simple joy of worship in our little white church has been too risky. The nearness and courage that comes from those who have walked with us for so many years, not available. So much was lost.
And yet, here we are. We could not flee and we could not fight in the ways that we would have. Instead, we anchored deep as we faced separation and isolation in doctor’s offices, hospital rooms, hotel bathrooms, and parking garages, together… and apart. We face our fears, which both bind us and separate us. We face the unknown future one step, one breath, one day at a time.
So, as we greet the New Year, we walk with weary steps, through an unfamiliar landscape. I have no great hopes for this year, no grand plans. This year, we tiptoe in the dark. We hold our own, and grasp for one another. This year, we simply walk on hopeful that light will return, as it always does.
