July 2021: Covid and the Collective
I'm holding a lot at once as I continue to reflect with colleagues and peers on life & work—and especially ministry leadership—in 2021/in the midst of the Delta variant. Many of these things have already been said, but it helps me to process where I am with all of it.
What’s bubbling up:
1) It’s not easy to make decisions when much is still unknown and when changes occur. It’s ok to do our best and let the rest go.
2) Maybe thinking like an ecosystem will bring us through this. We are interdependent species, & what happens to one part affects all. How we feel about it doesn’t change that reality even when we might want it to. Maybe this ecosystem image can ground us as we experience fatigue & uncertainty in changing protocols about masking, distancing, etc.
3) We need deeper reserves (in & through ourselves, communities, churches/faith spaces, and broader structures of society) of self-awareness, compassion, bridge-building, truth-telling, and ability to sit with discomfort to help us acknowledge/be with the emotional impacts in ourselves and others of this immense challenge.
Maybe these reserves can fuel the reminders that self-sacrifice, asking for help, breathing deeply, and loving our neighbors will help us make it through. Maybe imagination can help us envision & enact a world that is better equipped to take care of its ecosystems (which very much include us) when future hard things happen— because they will.
4) When things in #3 aren’t cultivated (and I think we can name misinformation and the ways public health has become partisan debate as part of this, among many other factors), we will continue to make one another expendable. We will see more people get sick and die because we haven’t remembered that we belong, we’re called to love sacrificially, and that sometimes hard realities ask us to do things that aren’t fun.
4) We have choices! We can do our best to care for one another, or our overemphasis on individual interest will keep us stuck, further fragment us, and lead to more destruction.
I believe we can do this, but some days feel like dystopia AND selflessness— all commingled together.
How are y’all holding up?
What’s bubbling up:
1) It’s not easy to make decisions when much is still unknown and when changes occur. It’s ok to do our best and let the rest go.
2) Maybe thinking like an ecosystem will bring us through this. We are interdependent species, & what happens to one part affects all. How we feel about it doesn’t change that reality even when we might want it to. Maybe this ecosystem image can ground us as we experience fatigue & uncertainty in changing protocols about masking, distancing, etc.
3) We need deeper reserves (in & through ourselves, communities, churches/faith spaces, and broader structures of society) of self-awareness, compassion, bridge-building, truth-telling, and ability to sit with discomfort to help us acknowledge/be with the emotional impacts in ourselves and others of this immense challenge.
Maybe these reserves can fuel the reminders that self-sacrifice, asking for help, breathing deeply, and loving our neighbors will help us make it through. Maybe imagination can help us envision & enact a world that is better equipped to take care of its ecosystems (which very much include us) when future hard things happen— because they will.
4) When things in #3 aren’t cultivated (and I think we can name misinformation and the ways public health has become partisan debate as part of this, among many other factors), we will continue to make one another expendable. We will see more people get sick and die because we haven’t remembered that we belong, we’re called to love sacrificially, and that sometimes hard realities ask us to do things that aren’t fun.
4) We have choices! We can do our best to care for one another, or our overemphasis on individual interest will keep us stuck, further fragment us, and lead to more destruction.
I believe we can do this, but some days feel like dystopia AND selflessness— all commingled together.
How are y’all holding up?
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