When it ends

I keep a literal “post-pandemic” list of all the things I’m going to do when this is over.  It currently has 26 items.  

8 of them involve leaving the house by myself.

5 of them are business items that have been put off indefinitely.

5 others involve simply eating together with someone who doesn’t live in my house.

6 are church-related.

3 involve seeing family relations that don’t reside in my household and have therefore been off-limits.

And 4 are names of friends we miss.  [Some of these categories are overlapping.]

This Saturday marks one year to the day since we went into quarantine.  One year of new crisis-related vocabulary, learning how to make a face mask fashionable, gingerly navigating passionate disagreements in close relationships.  One year of essentially hiding from my fellow man.  

One year of coming to first delight in and then hate Zoom.

Ears, strapped onto a styrofoam airplane, sporting his custom 3-D-printed Super Ears helmet, about to bravely hazard experimental aeronautics in the front yard.

I said months ago that all of 2020 felt like Advent.  Now it’s March, that bleak month that competes only with February for the most depressing page on the calendar.  The novelty of a new year has worn off and we long for spring.  Kind of like month twelve of a pandemic, in March we’re cooped up inside and it’s yucky outside and I just ache for summer.  For the cold and the bleak and the waiting to be over.

And it’s also Lent:  that time on the church calendar when fasting and deprivation is traditional, when we lean into the insufficiency of this life and its appetites and sharpen our hope in Jesus.  

So the pandemic has given us an extended Advent of gloom, a yearlong March of longing, and a drawn-out Lent of deprivation.  Maybe, maybe, this summer will be Christmas, June, and Easter morning rolled into one.

In a way.  But only in a shadow way.  Because one day I’ll close my eyes and when I open them, every Advent, every March, every Lenten deprivation will be over.  And that glad morning will be the end, and the beginning, forevermore.