Molding This Quarantine Moment
Molding This Quarantine Moment:
Finding normal in the abnormality of it all
by Taylor May
The news these days has me on edge and brimming with anxiety for many reasons. So much so that I really don’t even want to write it down. But facing it, naming it, is half the battle, isn’t it? So here it is: The world, the entire world, is experiencing the effects of a severely contagious pandemic. Millions of people across the world are working from home. Offices are closed. Hospitals are bombarded with worried people, sick people, and head-to-toe sealed and sanitized nurses or even less protection. Every morning when I grab my phone to see what time it is, news of the lockdown being extended or a family member being exposed to the virus alert my worry. It’s the very definition of too much.
About a week ago, days into our new “Stay At Home” routine, I surrendered to reality. I let myself, just for a moment, come up from under the fog of the world’s anxieties to see the sun suspended in a cloudless, smogless sky. I heard the birds, rustling leaves without the backdrop of motorcycles and horns. I haven’t heard an airplane for 3 days. If I surrender the little amount of control I’m attempting to have over this global-scale situation, I can settle into these long, warm, slow days. Life these days offers many life lessons. One being, mold each moment into all it’s meant to be. Those moments might be tiresome, they might be hungry, they might be anxious. That’s ok. Let it happen. Surrender it all because others will be sweet, full, beautiful, normal.
My heart has always craved Normal. It’s been the subject of many sentences I’ve written. I like to say I seek it in the chaoticness around me. I think I’ve believed that I have up until this point. Up until we found ourselves stuck in our home for who knows how long. Normal’s all we got to work with. You know, things like laundry, cleaning, cooking dinner, playing endless rounds of peekaboo with a one-year-old? Those kinds of normal things. It wasn’t until now that I realized my love affair with normal is purely conceptual, wishful wondering.
I love the idea of normal. But the actuality of it is something I occasionally sit in long enough to write a line or two, but mostly avoid to do something bigger, better, more noteworthy.
But suddenly, noteworthy has lost its noteworthiness. My social feeds are full of people doing normal things and thriving. It’s a long, deep, renewing exhale.
At the start of 2020 two books came out on the subject of slowness. John Mark Comer’s book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, was a sweet, refreshing call back to the pace of life we were meant to live, and out of the frenetic pace we’ve told ourselves we need to survive. And Jefferson Bethke’s, To Hell With The Hustle, slapped our culture’s glorification of “hustling” in its face. I don’t think this was coincidental. Both authors, while having very different solutions to a very real cultural problem, urge us to find our value, not in the essence or the amount of the things we do, but in the God who doesn’t need us to do any of those things. Both are a plea to be, just be with God -- to enjoy slowness, normalness, and the abundance of our Creator God.
Teetering about my house, I settle into the mundane. I do dishes, take my one-year-old out for walks, type a bit of feelings onto a page, talk with my husband, have tea with neighbors. The familiar pressure to perform releases when I realize there’s nothing I can do. I’m in, we are, in utter lack of control.
While these problems are not small, by any means, we have a great advantage here … one I’m seeing so many step into with courage: We have the time to actually DO the things we always wish we had the time to do.
Don’t miss this moment.
Dust off the baseball glove, play a round of catch with your kids on the front lawn, barefoot and soaking in the last warmth of dusk.
Open up Pinterest and see what you could actually do when you set your mind to it.
Linger with your Bible in the morning, without hurry and without a pressing agenda. Sit and let the Word wash over you and define your day.
Talk on the phone for hours.
Make a cup of tea, drink it slowly and talk to God and let Him talk to you.
Make a meal, set the table, and eat there.
John Mark Comer said in a sermon I don’t quite remember the name/context of, “The worst that can happen is death, and death has been defeated.”
Rest, Kindred. Stay safe, and stay home. But rest and make the most of the hours you’ve been given.