Vivid Season

 

Both of my grandfathers made it to their nineties, and although the average life expectancy is on the decline for most Americans, I’m still optimistically referring to my upcoming birthday as “middle-aged.” As such, I’ve begun to write a memoir of a particularly vivid season - the two years surrounding the birth of our youngest daughter, Annaka. Many are already familiar with her journey so I’ll spare you the details, but I’m trying to complete the “advanced reader’s copy” before she enters Kindergarten next fall.

Much of the story I can recall from memory, and much of it was written during the events themselves in the form of columns and social media posts. I’ve also made short journal entries for all three of our kids since the day they were born, and reflecting back on those primary sources has been incredibly helpful.

It was a difficult time, clearly, but it was also one marked by an inner peace. We remember it as a season of tremendous goodwill.

I’ve been thinking about goodwill quite a bit recently, since it's Christmastime and all, and also because goodwill could be hard to find in a year that wasn’t short on much of anything else. From the coronavirus to racial tension, from the election strife to natural disasters, this has been an historic year.

To complicate matters, however, many of us are no longer reading this history from the same book.

As just one example, in my expert opinion, the mask debate ought never have been a debate at all. After all, the Apostle Peter tells us to listen to civil authorities, even those who ask we do things we’d rather not. Paul implores us in Romans to live in harmony with our fellow man. Christ himself insists we love our neighbors, and wearing a mask to slow down our own potentially infectious air seemed like such an easy, visual way to do just that; to swallow our pride and our desire for individual “freedom” for the greater good.

Others, clearly, took a different view.

Regardless, we seem to be living in alternate but parallel worlds, sharing the same space on a finite planet but experiencing reality in starkly, and sometimes dangerously, different ways. Are we losing the capacity, as Atticus Finch told his daughter Scout, to “walk a mile in another man’s shoes?” Have we lost the patience to imagine ourselves in “another man’s skin?”

Paraphrasing from a book much older than To Kill a Mockingbird, in Matthew Jesus told his disciples that at the end of the age, the love of many would grow cold. We see this “coldness” on the news, of course, but the news has always been bad.

Sadly, I have also witnessed it in people I know. Sometimes I see it in my own children, snapping at each other like crabs in a bucket.

Most chilling, I feel it in myself, such as when I digest headlines with an icy, “Yeah, sure, but how is that going to affect me?”
            It’s frightening, and while some consider this troubled time as just that—an unfortunate series of historical events, colliding into and exacerbating each other at a breakneck pace—others view it through a darker prism, as a harbinger of a world order nearing collapse.

Merry Christmas, huh?

                                     

The good news, however, believe it or not, is that it doesn’t actually matter.

It doesn’t matter at all, at least not as it affects the way we should live out our daily lives in the coming New Year.

Each day, in 2021, we should pray. Whether this has been a tough season we’ll eventually move past or things are just getting started, we should meditate on God’s word. We should ask for forgiveness, and forgive those who’ve slighted us. We should offer help where it’s needed, smile, and fill in the gaps.

We should slow down and breathe, and allow others the same privilege.

Thanks to Annaka, we’ve never had the privilege to join the public health debates that have saturated these last ten months. We never had the option to “pick a tribe” when it came to this strangest of culture war spats. Three groups of trusted doctors from three different places—Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Effingham—have all been on the same page for months: the corona virus is real; it’s serious; take precautions.

So we have done just that, by keeping all three of our kids at home to learn remotely, for example. Because I venture each day into a school with hundreds of noses, I continue to wear a mask around her indoors. We’ve had to miss family gatherings and social functions, and we will continue to take precautions in the coming months.

And we will absolutely pull up our sleeves when the time comes to get vaccinated. 

            After all the needles she’s had to endure these last five years, it’s the least we can do.