This week marks the one-year mark of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of the COVID-19 Pandemic. 365 days later, I am taking stock.
Oddly, I have been looking at pictures of me living life in 2019. Yeah, 2019. You’d think I’d do more of a deep dive into all things 2020. However, I found myself this week, for the very first time, lamenting the loss of normal. Lamenting moments, activities, things that I have not thought about in over a year. Going through my pictures, I saw where I preached services in Chicago, attended conferences in Houston, went to malls, walked the sidewalks of my city, and wandered into the newest hotspots that just opened. (Ok, maybe hotspots is a word I shouldn’t use these days haha…see what I mean!) In 2019, I wasn’t vegetarian and would chow down on Simone’s (my wife's) homemade fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I had no facial hair. Oddly, I couldn’t grow any (what in the covid is going on now). If we wanted to jump in the car and drive up to Orlando to go to Disney, it was a quick decision with no arrangements needed, no mask-wearing, no checking the website for protocols, etc. We attended the So You Think You Can Dance tour here in St. Pete. We settled into our seats at the Straz for a Dear Evan Hansen. We had people over to the house, all the time, without thinking through their whereabouts prior and if they had been safe. Cruises. I had become the Executive Pastor at my church with big dreams of overhauling our staff culture and setting our church community on a path to deeper spirituality and relationship with Jesus.
That was 2019. And I miss that.
2020
The pandemic year shifted everything. And you’ve probably heard me talk about this before, but it really was the busiest year for me in ministry and community advocacy. And so I don’t think I gave myself much time to miss the former things. My focus was on my family, church, city, and making sure I did my part to keep people safe and whatever it took to move us out of this mess.
What I lament most is maybe not maximizing appreciating what I had. I dunno.
As I do now. As I reminisce. As I contemplate. As I look back, I am using what I miss about 2019 to propel me to seek smarter, more depth of living in 2021. It’s like 2020 didn’t fully count in terms of LIVING. And I want to reclaim my time.
Am I even making sense? Look, my point is, as we continue to move into the next new normal post-pandemic (ish), there will be lots of conversations, data, arguments, analysts about what we could have done better or not done at all. It will cause us to move to our political and ideological corners for sure. But in an uncommon way, let’s take hold of our own evaluations — navigating for ourselves down the path of remembrance to establish a baseline of who we were, who we are now, and who we would like to be in the future.
We’ve all changed. We have. Let’s not be passive about that. Let’s be uncommonly intentional about exploring what that means. Because when we do, what bubbles up to the surface for you and me, literally changes our city, our world - we’ve changed together. It would be a tragedy to minimize and/or not acknowledge that fact. We will be less than if we do.
Two Books I’m Reading
I’m still reading Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (It’s a large book)
I’ve started reading Tyler Staton’s Searching For Enough
I’m Watching
The Black Church on PBS
Amend: The Fight For America on Netflix
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