A Time For Us

Inevitably, the alarm sounds. We wake from our dreams, and we go about another day. Get up, shower, feed the kids, off to school, go to work, come home, make supper, playtime, bathe the kids, housework, off to bed, and repeat. Day in, day out, we get wrapped up in a dreadful cycle. Like logs in a machine, we turn and turn, rarely stopping, rarely appreciating or focusing on the most important aspects of our life.

But then something out of the ordinary happens. Our lives become disrupted. Not only disrupted, but threatened. Our leaders and societal professionals tell us that our very way of living is dangerous. Working, grocery shopping, going to church, going out with friends; it all can bring devastation if we do not just stay home.

To most, this sounds like fun. No work. No school. We get to sleep in. It is like a vacation, except vacations are planned for. You know when a vacation will end.

No one planned for this. No one saw just how bad this disruption would be.

We sit in our homes, glued to the news outlets. When news of the spread of this novel coronavirus began, it was accompanied with all the possible devastation that it could bring. This “vacation” suddenly  had a dark cloud, a reason to fear.

 We try to soak it all in, unable to do anything about it. But wait. Doing nothing is something. Doing nothing is helping stop the spread of death. It is all too easy to feel unproductive, counter productive even to step away from the routine of what we consider normal. It is easy to feel lazy or gluttonous. It is easy to feel scared or mad at what life has thrown at us. Yet, we are faced with an opportunity.

So we settle into our new normal. We get up, make coffee, and turn the tv on. We replace our usual activities with dread and fear of the unknown.

Yet, we have a choice. We can choose to spend this newfound time cultivating the relationships closest to our hearts. We can choose to turn off the tv and spend time with our families, our children, and even ourselves. We can talk to God, pray, read, write, or paint. We can take this time for us. We can take this time to make us stronger spiritually, physically, or mentally.

This will pass and we will return to the life and the turning of the machine once more. But we have the choice to return with more patience, more understanding, more gratitude, and more love.

Although we are not blind to what is going on around us, me and my family are choosing to embrace one another. Yes, the unknown is very scary, but we are choosing to trust God. We are choosing to slow down just a bit and enjoy life for now. We simply just have to make this a time for us.

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