It’s been more than a minute since I’ve written anything on the blog. I wanted to share how Adam and I found a way to make our 20th anniversary special, despite this stupid pandemic and not being able to take the big trip I had hoped for or even eat inside our favorite restaurant. But time got away from me.
I wanted to share that a Thanksgiving pandemic wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. No, it wasn’t what we had hoped for but it was quiet and low key. But time got away from me.
I wanted to share how our Christmas plans, my 45th birthday, and New Years Eve got derailed by Covid-19 (long story short, we all got it; including my mom. Thankfully, we’re all out of quarantine, the boys are fine and the adults have recovered but still get a little tired) But sharing our details felt out of place when so many people are truly suffering because of the virus. I’m so grateful that our experience was a less serious one and so feel obliged to keep the details to myself when so many lives have been devastated.
In hind sight, I’ve had a lot to share but have allowed my own doubt and procrastination get in the way of said sharing.
After January 6, I really felt the words in me dry up. Anything I was thinking of writing about the new year before January 6 felt insignificant and trivial. There wasn’t anything new I could add to the world of words that hadn’t already been said.
This week I was reminded of the wilderness that we continue to wander through as we stumble from 2020 to 2021. I wrote this devotional back in October, 2020. Writing about a new year that I had a deep desire to be better than the last yet knowing it would continue to be a shit show (who knew 2021 started off by asking 2020 to hold it’s beer) was difficult. But perhaps looking toward the future with a lot of caution and a little hope is the only way to look toward the future right now.
As the year of our Lord 2020 drew to a close, I kept thinking, This is it; it’s almost over; we’re almost to the finish line. I knew in my head that the clock wouldn’t reset at the stroke of midnight on December 31, and 2021 would magically be a return to “normal,” but in my heart, I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to wake up on January first and discover 2020 was a bad dream. The year had felt like a long slog through the wilderness, and if we could just make it to the promised land of 2021, I thought, everything would be OK.
However, hoping that it will all just be OK is a false hope. By putting our faith in leaders and hoping we’ve made the right choice, we place too much importance on people who will eventually disappoint us. By pointing the finger and placing blame for our problems on groups who don’t align with our ideologies, we have forgotten to take the log out of our own eye before pointing out the splinter in everyone else’s. By refusing to acknowledge and repent of racism, classism, and nationalism (along with any other isms that separate us into categories of haves and have-nots) sown by our forefathers which have grown into thornbushes, we will never truly heal the deep wounds those sins have caused over generations.
At the risk of sounding like a Debbie Downer, I present the theory that the turmoil of 2020 was a precursor to wandering the wilderness into 2021 and beyond…
Continue reading at The Glorious Table.
Leave a Reply