Dear Pandemic,
Where would I be without you? Thanks to you and all your many unexpected gifts I am truly on my way to becoming a most excellent person. I am maximizing my opportunities and finding all the Silver Linings™. Just this week I have updated my window decoration three times: first a rainbow, then “Thank You, Teachers,” and finally, of course, “God Bless the U.S.A.”
I am homeschooling like a boss. I have learned to do my work on one laptop with my right hand, open the homework PDFs on a different one with my left hand, and log my kids into Prodigy with voice commands—simultaneously, of course.
With all my free time, I am following the protocols I got from Twitter to learn a second language (BTW, I chose Mandarin Chinese, because obvs) and to finally get into meditation. My mantra is, “I am sufficient for all the achievement embedded within me.” It seems to be working. I feel very energized.
Someone said once, “Never waste a crisis,” I haven’t looked up who it was, but I saw a meme that said it was Mother Theresa and that sounds about right. John Piper says we are being punished by God to be cleansed from our sins, so I’m working hard to let this crisis not just wash my hands, but wash my soul as well. I’m certain with extra effort, I can achieve that #goal as well.
I do have to confess that I have not perfected social distancing standards. This is a growth area for me. I went to the grocery store this week with only a mask and plastic gloves on—no goggles, shame on me (Is immuno-goggles a thing? My friend sent me a link to them on Facebook, but it was flagged as a fraud alert. I never trust those things. Facebook is part of the government, I think.) Worse yet, I went for a walk instead of a jog and I read an article about someone who was arrested for being out walking instead of jogging because walking is not really exercise and is not essential.
Confession Alert: I was actually just tired.
To help with this, I’ve decided to do my walking at 2 am when no one else is out and I am only sharing my germs with owls and ghosts. My spouse says this is really creepy, but I’m up at 2 am worrying about the immunocompromised, so I might as well get some exercise. I live in a nice neighborhood so no one will arrest me for walking, right?
Oh, dear Pandemic, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:
I love slowness! I used to rush around trying to do ALL. THE. THINGS. and you can see from my letter that I’m all about the slows now. What a #gift!
Family. It’s all about family! I don’t even remember anyone else’s names any more! I’m just here for the people who live in my house and share the same smells as me!
Don’t even make me say “One Square Wiping” because it is definitely a thing. (A thing I love!)
Shop local! We buy one delivery meal every day from a different restaurant each day. DON’T WORRY, I googled all of them, found their owner’s names, and then looked up those owners to make sure they were really #local.
I love my church! Church in my PJs! Church on my couch! Zoom church!
One word: sweatpants. (But honestly not all day because I read a blog post about how we are all going to forget how to function in normal society if we don’t wear zippers and buttons, so I start my day with a button shirt and skinny jeans on, even though no one can see them on Zoom, I know they can feel it in my confidence. You’re more confident when you’re wearing uncomfortable pants. It’s been proven by science.
Cleaning! My baseboards have never looked so good.
Creativity. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine and I’m pretty sure salsa dancing was invented during the Spanish Flu. I’ve always been a terrible artist, but nows the time to learn oil paints. It’s gonna be great.
Gratitude. I am thankful for all the things all the time now, which before I totally couldn’t have been because I was way too busy trying to impress people.
Honestly, though, dear Pandemic, where would I be without you? It’s clearly God’s grace that we are finally at a point where we can get done everything we’ve been trying to achieve. Freed from the pressures of having to talk to people face-to-face, hug the grieving, play games with our friends or share meals with strangers, we are now—FINALLY—in a place to get done the important stuff.
I’ve spent my whole life working to silence the inner critic. That little voice which says, “You are never enough.” That voice makes me so weak. I hate weakness, thank God this Pandemic is building up our immune systems, making us strong. I know that the Bible says that God is strong when we are weak, but that’s not really the religion I grew up with. It seems to me we show the world how strong God is by being excellent.
Excellent sermon, pastor.
Our worship band is excellent.
Christians are doing so many excellent things in the world, that shows our God must be the right one, right?
Anyway. In my old life, I was always trying to silence that inner critic from nagging at me by gaining the approval of others. Now, I feel I might finally have an opportunity. With all of those other people out of my life, I can finally focus on achieving the approval of the one person who has always brought me down: me.
Dear Quarantine, I love you.
XOXO - Performing Grace.
Imagine taking a giant box and filling it full of groceries. You tape up the sides. Reinforce the bottom, convinced that by any effort possible you can get more into that box. Despite all your best efforts, the box breaks. The sides split and all that it was meant to contain starts to topple out into a chaotic mess. The freshest of ingredients take on the most damage, the Twinkies survive. The plastic cups will be fine, but the pears won’t survive the bruises.
You search around looking for anything to store up all that you need to carry now that the box is broken. All that remains is a standard size paper bag. Sturdy in its own way, but not built to carry the weight of all you want to bring along. When you shrink down the container, everything is even more crowded, everything feels tighter around you, vulnerabilities even more exposed.
The modern world and the self-help religion it spawned (often called Christianity) made an unfulfillable promise: the horizons limitless, the boundaries always imagined, our pursuit of the greater and the more always justified. In an unplanned moment, we took all of that promise and expectation and poured it into a much smaller life.
We were told the world was going on pause, but no one said why. No one said that the way we lived, the pressure we absorbed, the performance we rehearsed, was loaded with unintended consequences, splitting the sides of every soul, every institution and even the natural world itself with bloat that could not be sustained.
With our big box split, we tried to pour all our expectations for happiness, self-sufficiency, moral surety, and confidence into a soft-sided small world. An immobile one, where the boundaries were real (as they always were) and enforced, and the audience for our performances hidden from sight.
“We’ve got this,” we say. This is just one more hill to climb. We’ve built our whole lives for performance under pressure. Surely by squeezing ourselves into this enhanced pressurization will only produce more performance. Surely we will come out the other end better people. Won’t we? Won’t we?
But now it is clear, some of what we are packing will have to be left here. This pit stop will have to remake our expectations of ourselves and each other if it is to have any formative good. This is not some saccharine “silver lining” or masochistic vision of “what God is really doing.” This is just a simple truth. A remaking of this scale can only expose and bruise, squeeze and upend. There is no guarantee this is redemptive. There is no hidden upside. There is only the facing of ourselves, and the unmitigated grace of a God who welcomes and celebrates all we see.
The lightness of grace can not be danced in a suit of armor. Our scars will show and all our bow-leggedness will be on full display. Performing grace, sweating to show how much we can achieve, is always done with the jaw clenched, the eyes glazed, the heart hardened.
We don’t “got this.” We are struggling. Our sides splitting under the weight of too many packaged products. For many of us, these isolated days are not making us better, they are showing us frail. Thank, God.
Each day, I am finding, is one more critical fork in this road. Will I thank this quarantine from proving me strong? Or will I thank God for loving me weak?
I feel my vulnerability, my insufficient self-sufficiency, more with each passing day. And slowly, I am finding that this frailty is converting me to Jesus in ways I have never been saved before.
"Maybe all we can do is to make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor." - Anne Lamott
Thirtysixwords as my place to detox from performative religion and awaken to the gentle rhythms of God’s good world. You’re welcome to join me.