Friday, September 11, 2020

September 2020: Thoughts on Covid 19

September 2020: Thoughts on Covid-19 

 

Our wall of masks has grown, as Doug brings one home from the hospital after work and hangs it up with the others. A daily reminder of the days of mask-wearing.

The weekly pan of lemon bars makes its’ scheduled appearance. I wonder if we will hate lemon bars once a safe and tested vaccine is available to us? Once a safe country is available to us?

We eat the lemon bars when we watch Father Brown and Schitts Creek at night.

A dozen (at least) yellow finches have been in our backyard the last few mornings to join the other bird choruses. Their delicate song sounds like fairy chimes.

We made one of those dreaded trips to the ER when Doug tore his quadriceps. Surgery followed three days later. His recovery will be long. He is a pleasant patient and I love caring for him. He has a medieval torture device (a brace) on his left leg. It is not pleasant.

I’m preaching for our Tennessee church, Covenant Presbyterian Church in Johnson City. Five weeks of sermons recorded in five different locations. Preaching gives me spiritual exercise.

While Doug was in surgery, I sermonized into my cell phone camera while ensconced in the hospital chapel.

People enter the chapel with pleas to God for the lives of their loved ones. Hospital chapels have such a specific use; prayers for life to conquer death. Covid-19 has made the pleadings in hospital chapels almost impossible. Visitors and family members are often restricted from the hospital, let alone God’s small house.

E-mails, phone calls, and even a few in-person (masked and socially distanced) visits have filled the corners of my days.

The food bank is still the most worthwhile ministry I’ve ever been part of.

Our daughter will be married this month. We will make our way to Chicago and joyfully “marriage” (her word) Lauren to Sylvester Fejokwu. It’s not the wedding they had planned, but it’s still all theirs. The celebration of their nuptials will not be lessened just because the guests are fewer.

So many things have changed for those who marry and those who bury in 2020.  

Time has dragged during these months of Covid-19, at least for us. The news that our President was aware in January of how deadly the virus was, and yet took no action, is beyond the pale. The spread of Covid could have been slowed, and lives saved. That’s the truth.

Hospital and mortuary workers have watched almost 200,000 dead bodies flood their spaces. They are exhausted and traumatized. Some have succumbed to the disease and some have lost their own lives.

It all could have been lessened and this horrific pain minimized.

The President, who strives to instill panic in the American people every single day with false fears and shocking rhetoric, is pretending he didn’t want to panic the American people with the news of a deadly pandemic. His administration supported his self-serving cruelty. He, and they, can’t lie and excuse this away.

Death has conquered too many lives. Prayers were prayed by the bereaved, while their loved ones died alone in a hospital room.

There is no excuse. Everyone making an excuse for the most dangerous President in our history needs to finally stop. Just stop. There are no more excuses to spout. The mouths of his willfully ignorant followers must cease their protestations of what is true: The President chose to let the people of this country spread a deadly disease just by breathing. He chose to let us die.

His followers have been fooled by the greatest and most dangerous fool of all.

Besides the horror of death, jobs have been lost, businesses have been shuttered, schools are now social experiments, families don’t have enough food….

Systemic racism is no longer led by cowards hiding under white sheets. The toxicity of White Supremacy is on full display and led by the man living in the People’s House.

It’s September 2020. In less than two months we will elect a President and specific congress women and men. My prayer is that sanity will be restored by people of integrity and those who desire to be true servants of this country.

Doug and I will watch the happenings of election night, hopefully sans brace, while eating lemon bars.

As a good friend of mine said, "When life gives you lemons, make lemon bars..."

I hope it’s the last pan of lemon bars I bake for a long, long time.