This week, I heard an interview with a public health official recounting the days when the “shelter in place” order began the COVID-19 pandemic. She recalls, with some embarrassment, thinking that it would likely only be a few weeks…though who among us would have foreseen otherwise?
This week marked five years since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though we can speak with relief of having come through its darkest days, we do so mindful of the great losses we suffered in that time. Some of us lost loved ones, either to covid or adjacent conditions. Some of us lost vital years when we wanted to be hugging grandchildren or meeting life partners. Some of us continue to live with the chronic conditions of long-Covid, and many of us must continue to take great precautions to keep from becoming ill.
I look back and can scarcely believe that we spent more than a year doing church online, essentially mothballing our campus and continuing to get to know one another through zoom rather than in person.
One thing that stands out for me is the dissonance we felt as we returned to “normal.” Though much of our life together is a story of thriving in ministry, sometimes the trappings of normalcy can have a bittersweet taste to them, because we know at a deep level that we have changed. Appearances and heartache haven’t always lined up in the post-COVID years.
There is grief in that. But there is also hope, for God works in our lives and in our hearts when we name what has changed and remember when our hearts were broken, so that we can continue to welcome God into our journeys of healing and recovery.
For me, change has come as a deeper gratitude for the gift of life and a keener sense of God’s grace that surrounds me. That doesn’t diminish what I lost in the pandemic, but it does help to re-center my spirit. It reminds me that courage means keeping an open heart as I look to what God has in store for all of us in the years to come.
The Very Rev. Bernard J. Owens