There are a lot of things about this pandemic and shelter in place that are scary, unknown, and emotionally exhausting. The numbers of new cases, and deaths, coming out of places like Italy and New York. The isolation from friends and family, the need to wear masks to Target that hide our germs, and smiles.

Then there are things that make you smile, bring you joy. Like the Zoom choir videos of “It is Well with My Soul” and “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”, The artists doing live, free concerts, and Rend Collective with their Socially Distant Worship Club. Or this one that made me want to move to Pittsburg. There was a guy who was teaching all his secrets to having a clear video for a zoom meeting, talk about pivoting his business for the times! These things make me smile. Often we see the best of humanity in times of crisis, people offer what they have to give.

Times of crisis are training for real life. In the business of the normal we are easily lost in our day to day. The minutes turn to months, I see it every year as I watch my girls celebrate another birthday wondering where the time went. In crisis, normal is forced to cease and our comforts and routines are made to alter or stop. It is in this place we have to step back and take inventory of our lives.

Today a friend told me that she read an article about how a high percent of people are re-visiting broken relationships. Now I am not saying we should revisit old relationships that may have ended for good reasons. But it made me wonder if we allowed relationships to end and then instead of feeling the feelings that allow the healing to take place from the broken relationship we just kept going. We stayed busy. We moved on. We pushed it aside. And now that we have all this time with ourselves those things we pushed deep are rising to the surface.

In the justice work I do I have met so many dear people who are horrified about the realities of modern day slavery and human trafficking, they want to do something, and after I help them with information and suggestions most of them go back to their lives without any real change. Not because they intend to be informed, but complacent, but because life needs to be lived. Children need to be taken to soccer, dinner needs to be cooked, the dishes need to be done, meetings attended, church volunteered at. We get so busy in the activity of living life that I believe that the actions that we are most called to often fall by the wayside.

How many couples want stronger marriages but can’t fit in time alone? How many parents feel like they blinked and they don’t know the teenager in the cap and gown in front of them? How many Friends have let relationships slide thinking that they will grab lunch next month when “things slow down”? How many self proclaimed Jesus’ followers are too exhausted to spend time with their Best Friend, Father and Savior?

In my own life, the most important things are the things I have to fight for. This is a lesson I am continually learning. It is easy to binge watch Netflix, to say yes to too many meetings, sleep in, spend too much time scrolling. None of these are bad things but when they take the place of the things I actually want to define my life, then they are not the right things.

I hope that this is what this time, for those of us who are non essential, is teaching us. I hope it is bringing a clarity about the truly meaningful things in life. I miss having coffee in a crowded coffee shop, sitting across from a friend for lunch, hugging my dad, spending the day with my mom, holding my sister’s baby, tickling my nephews and nieces. Yet when people talk about life getting back to normal I have a mini panic attack. If we are meant to get back to what life was like before COVID-19, I don’t want it. I want to carve out a new normal. I don’t want to live life where I feel I am running a race I can’t win. Instead, I want to focus on the things I want to mark my life, and do them in a way that is healthy for my family and me.

We can’t do it all but we can do the things we are meant to do. The ones that God the Author of our stories wrote for our life before the foundation of the world. Those things are the good things and they are also the things we will have to fight for.

In my work I am faced with vulnerabilities people experience daily. Vulnerabilities like homelessness, abuse, hunger, incapable parents, lack of friends, poor body image, spiritual abuse and I could go on. In our current situation, people around us are becoming more and more vulnerable every day. Job loss increases and good, hard working people who lived paycheck to paycheck loose their income, without a social safety net what will they do?

Jesus said that we will always have the poor with us. I don’t think this was a pass for us. Like, we don’t have to do anything because no matter what we do, they will always be with us. I think it was an opportunity. An opportunity to engage with people and their stories, people who are different than us. People who can teach us about love, faith, and trust. I have experienced this in my own life, the people who encourage my faith with their own the most are the ones who have experienced the most loss, the most abuse, the most poverty.

I wonder if you would do something with me. If you would sit before the Author God in a quiet time and space, maybe the early morning or late night, and ask him if what he wants to define your life currently does. And if the answer is no, will you ask him what it is that he wants you to uniquely offer the world?

Whenever we let go of the pen in surrender, we begin to truly live the life we were created for. I have not figured out how to do this perfectly, I am a messy work in progress. But daily surrender, this I have become accustomed to. During this time, I simply want to offer what I have to give. A life of surrender, seeing and serving those around us who are unlike us. Maybe together we can walk, hand in hand, following the Author.