Apr 28, 2020
By Katrina Goodrich
It’s midnight and my day is far from over. It began around 7:00 AM when I rolled out of bed and started finishing what I hadn’t gotten done the day before. I’ve been waiting six hours for approval on a packet that I really wanted to start sending out 4 or 5 hours ago—so that by this point I’d be done and heading to bed. I’m just waiting.
I realized that I haven’t written my article for the month (and it’s past the deadline—again—sorry, Pat). I’ve been thinking about it, sure, but really there was nothing I wanted to say that people probably haven’t heard so many times over the past month, and will hear so many times more in coming days, weeks and months. I’m waiting on some inspiration that, to tell you the truth, I still haven’t found.
City lights that brighten the view off my deck have dimmed and, in some cases, gone out—it’s dark and quiet. I’m waiting to get tired but am still wide awake, although I should be exhausted. I know that I am not going to want to get out of bed in the morning.
Fell asleep on the floor of my living room around 3:30 last night (it’s 7:30 now). I’ve edited the paragraphs above and they remind me of a captain’s log—but there is a reason I haven’t just deleted them and started over. I’ve noticed a theme in my wee hour rambling.
Right now, to some degree, it seems like the world has stopped turning, and we’re waiting for things to start back up and life to resume its normal pace. For some of us that “stop” feels like things have slowed down and for others (like me at this moment) we’re running harder.
Joshua 10:1-15 tells the story of the day God made the sun standstill. In the story, time literally stopped but the people did not. Neither the Amorites nor the Israelites stopped what they were doing. Most often in cinema, when time stops, so do most characters and the scene they’re in (think spilled drink suspended in air), except for one or two “special” people who can move through time or something. Yet, on the day the sun stayed in the sky for 24 hours, everyone kept moving and accomplishing their goals and tasks.
Life doesn’t stop because we’re living in a historic moment when the world is turned on its ear and our regularly scheduled things aren’t happening. For those of you with children in the house—I suspect that is abundantly clear. Don’t wait for life to regain its regular rhythm to live—in fact, don’t wait to live period. This isn’t a judgement on how you’re doing life, by the way. I firmly suspect that I will not be in the portion of society that emerges from quarantine with a new skill.
Truthfully, I always must be careful of waiting and becoming stagnant even when it looks like I’m moving. Some of you are thinking the Bible says: wait on the Lord. I don’t think that waiting always means standing still. We aren’t the sun, we’re the children of God. Because we don’t know what the next right move is, we go through the motions of living and miss life, so focused on what we don’t have or can’t do yet. Sound familiar?
Crazily enough, maybe a quarantine is the time to learn how to embrace life. So, we can’t do or have everything we want to a higher degree than normal. Maybe it’s time to learn how to actively wait, focusing on what we can do (no judgment if you wait from a position on your bed or couch).
