Yesterday, I was miserable. I was tired of staying home. I was resentful that I had to. I was angry that an invisible pathogen had disrupted my comfortable existence, and I wanted it to quit, right now. It's been two and a half weeks, and people are still getting sick and people are still dying, and the curve's not flattened yet and it's certainly not going down, and how long is it going to be, anyway? Weeks more? Months? Am I going to have to spend the whole beautiful summer stuck at home? It all just sucks.
Yes, I was miserable. I was grumpy and ungrateful and fed up.
The problem is, that I'm stuck at home. I can't get away when I'm feeling rumpled in my spirit. I can't distract me. And my poor housemate is locked up with me for who knows how much longer, and none of this is her fault, and if I don't deal with my stinky attitude, I make her lock-down more miserable, too. So I need to deal with my attitude.
I should pray. Problem is, I didn't feel like praying. What difference does it make, anyway? I've been praying and praying and praying, what feels like an endless wordless groan -- name after name after name of people I care about, and what difference is it making? This plague is going to last as long as it's going to last. The people who are going to get sick and die are going to get sick and die. I can beg and plead and look to the sky, but what difference does it make? God is going to do what God is going to do whether I pray or not.
I'm telling you, I was miserable, and grumpy, and fed up.
I'm not even going to get to see my family at Easter. I'm not going to get to go to church on Easter. And all I could think about was that I should have laid in a stock of mini-eggs.
Really, Marianne? Really?
Really?
Are you really going to go there? Fussing and fuming because you don't have mini-eggs when people are dying? I mean, how much shallower can you get?
Sometimes it takes truly outrageous thoughts to enter my head to bring me up short.
And it did bring me up short. Actually, it brings me to my knees. I read an article about how this season of lock-down is happening in the middle of Lent. N. T. Wright is right; fussing over chocolate mini-eggs is downright petty and silly now, when I think about the many things so many of us have had to give up -- jobs, socialising, church services, neat, safe routines, going to the gym, seeing loved ones, hugs from dear friends ... health ... safety ... life.
But it makes me realise how, still, I grasp for control. My world has shrunk considerably since March 12. But, still, I am holding tightly to the world that remains. I have not truly surrendered. I have reluctantly relinquished control of things beyond the border of my property lines, but I am hanging on with white knuckles to the things that lie within. I am trying with everything in me to live my life as much like I did Before. Before coronavirus. Before social distancing. Before everything collapsed and friends lost work and loved ones had to go out there every day and risk their lives because they have to go out there and I don't, before people I know started getting sick and maybe even dying. I fixate on the mini-eggs, not because I really want mini-eggs, but because in the old days, I'd have gone out and gotten mini-eggs if I'd wanted them that badly, but now the mini-eggs aren't worth risking my life for, and Out There -- where I have no control -- intrudes on In Here where I think I do. It's not really mini-eggs I want. It's control. And if not actual control, then at least the illusion of it.
It makes me realise how, even in this season where my world has shrunk to the property line and not having mini-eggs is silly in light of how much we have all had to give up, even in this season of dearth, compared to so many in the world, there is no lack at all. "Christ, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself." How have I emptied myself? Yes, I have lost convenience and comfort and the freedom to go wherever I want whenever I want to. I have lost the sense of safety I had. I have lost the ability to gather with others. These are not insignificant losses, and I know that a good part of my angst is grief. But still, I have so much. I have a home, a roof over my head. I am able to socially distance because I have a home with walls and a roof and doors that I can close to the outside world. I have food in plenty on the table, even in the middle of a pandemic, and when I can't go out to get groceries, I can place an order for someone to bring them to me. I have clean running water, the ability to wash my hands dozens of times a day, to take hot showers and do laundry, and I even have hand lotion to soothe hands that are dry from being washed dozens of times a day. I can text and call and video chat with loved ones. I have clothes on my back and a car, filled with cheap gas, sitting in the driveway. I have a yard and a garden and I can sit on the back deck in the sunshine and do my grading because I even still have a job. Even in the middle of a pandemic, I am rich beyond most of the world's wildest dreams, and while people are squashed cheek-to-jowl in refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, and in dumps in Mexico and India, and in tiny apartments in all the urban centres around the world, I am complaining because I can't go out and buy mini-eggs, grumbling because my comfortable routine has been rumpled, and because the biggest thing I am grieving is the loss of my illusion of control.
Such a shabby spirituality. I know it won't do.
I'm not in control, not out there, and not in here, either. And it's only a matter of time before the realities of "out there" are felt "in here", in ways that are far more significant than mini-eggs. I don't know how that will happen. I know for many, it is happening already. Jobs lost. Rent due. Loved ones sick. Loved ones dying. Loved ones dead. I'm afraid of it, afraid of the pain that will come. I'm afraid that if I admit I have no control, I will be consumed by fear. But that is a lack of trust in a Sovereign God, a God who I am learning to lean into when I think about "out there" and "tomorrow" but who I am still holding at arms' length when I think about "here" and "today".
So here I am, on my knees, again. Praying. Not so much because praying changes things out there (although I fully believe it does), but because I so much need him to change things in me. I need to shed the shabby spirituality and be clothed in ferocious faith. If I am to be locked up for days, weeks, months, I do not want to emerge from my solitary confinement the same as I went in. I want him to change me. I want him -- frightening thought -- to empty me.
And then to fill me with himself, the one who holds all my yesterdays, every part of my today, and all my tomorrows in his hands, out there, and in here.
Even in the midst of COVID-19.
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