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New Day

by | Jun 1, 2020

As I turned the calendar to June I reached for the eraser to clear off the pre-pandemic plans and start over.  I was supposed to be headed for Florida next week for my first 5 day Women’s Breakaway Retreat.  I had reserved a beautiful home in Daytona with lots of ensuite bedrooms & a private pool.  We would enjoy some relaxation, fun with good company & grown in understanding of ourselves.  I’d train & coach, my girlfriend would cook & help facilitate.  It would be a blast, and I was so incredibly excited!!  Then COVID.

The last 11 or 12 weeks have been a blur!  Lots of fear, overwhelm & grief mixed with isolation has created what I call COVID Brain or the COVID FOG.

We are being bombarded with messages of fear talking about sickness & death and hospitals being overrun while lacking in supplies & equipment.  We are being told to isolate so we don’t get infected or worse infect someone else, even if we are asymptomatic.  We don’t even want to cough around another person.  We wonder if it’s safe to go to the grocery & do we need to wipe down everything when we get it home?  We have seen toilet paper and cleaning wipes disappear from store shelves and just as they start to return now it’s meat.  We wonder what might be next. 

We are overwhelmed with the amount of information and conflicting information being published & distributed.  We hear everything from more people have died than in multiple wars to it’s all a hoax.  How do we process what is true?  We are overwhelmed by keeping up with daily changing orders and closures & openings & mandates & suggestions.  As one commercial puts it we have become “social distancers, suddenly homeschoolers, and living room exercisers”.  We are overwhelmed in juggling all the new roles & new technology….most of which we don’t like & would have never chosen for ourselves.

We are grieving the loss of proms & graduations, seasons, competitions, performances & recitals, concerts & bbq’s, birthday parties & dinners.  We can’t be with loved ones in hospitals & nursing homes & are overly cautious of our newest additions because we don’t know, for sure, how to best protect them.  We are grieving the loss of small businesses & big dreams that just couldn’t hold on.  We grieve a ‘normal’ that we know won’t every really be the same again.

And as if all of this is not enough, we now are being reminded just how far as a culture we still need to go to love each other well. 

If you are still with me & reading this post, aren’t you tired?  I am.  I am tired of the FOG.  I’m tired of life being on hold.

It is a new day.  It is a new month.  I’m choosing today as a new beginning.  Will you join me?

I’m not fooling myself to think with a simple change of attitude I’m suddenly going to have my **** together & be able to act like the pandemic is over or racism doesn’t exist.  But today, I will do one thing that makes me feel hopeful.  And tomorrow, I will choose to do another.  What will your one thing be today?

If the FOG is keeping you from seeing anything you can do, then pray.  Simply ask God.  ‘God, what is one thing you want me to do today?”  He will never steer you wrong!

It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:22-23

Let’s encourage each other to start seeing through the FOG by posting your one thing below.  This isn’t a comparison game.  It can be small.  After all, how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time.

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