Hope is in the air.
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I’m Charlie Brown angling himself to kick the football, about to meet my fate with a face full of dirt.
But I swear there’s new life in the air. I smell it on walks through my neighborhood with mulch being laid. I see it in the newly planted trees by the river. I sense it with a kinder, more competent government handling our many crises.
And I feel it especially after receiving my first of two COVID-19 vaccine doses.
I’ve been super careful for an entire year of this pandemic combined with an autoimmune disease: avoiding airports, staying masked with only small groups of friends and family indoors, and wearing double-masks to grocery stores (stocking up with just monthly trips).
Family members and friends, near and far, have gotten this virus, and tragically some have lost their moms and uncles and other loved ones.
I’ve been determined to protect both myself and those around me to the best of my freaking ability. Now that I’ve started receiving this long awaited vaccine while simultaneously taking immunosuppressants for my disease, I feel like I’m starting to exhale after a year of holding my breath.
I’m already looking at flights this spring/summer for the ultimate release.
Can you believe it’s been almost two years since I last stepped on a plane?
Even though we’re not at all out of the woods yet with this pandemic, I’m growing confident that I’ll be able to look back on this bizarro year of COVID and my autoimmune disease and recognize perhaps the most personal growth of my life, outside of two summer camps and a 9-month quest across the continent.
I’ve become more patient, more present. More rested despite my ongoing restlessness. I’ve become more intentional. With myself and others.
And I’ve become more justice-minded in this year of isolation — to do something with this faith of mine. To borrow a vivid example from Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing: to not just retrieve dead bodies from the river, but to go upstream and find the source of all this death.
I’ve also become more agitated this year; yes, I have. It flat-out kills me to see Christians not wearing masks. Demanding that they hold church services in the face of “persecution.” Not even considering the community’s health when it comes to getting the vaccine.
When did we get this way? Am I blind; have we always? Or has COVID flipped some kind of power-hungry, fear-ridden, self-centered switch in American Christianity?
On the other side of this pandemic, can this awful switch be switched off?
I don’t know where the greater American Church goes from here. I’m troubled. But I want to do whatever my part with the smaller, local church.
I hope to restart my community group for sexual minorities here in Asheville next month. I hope to get involved in some volunteering capacity in my city when it’s safe to do so. And I want to never take for granted these gifts I’ve been given: a church, a city, a community, a home, a mission.
I’ve spent a ton of time over this last year of isolation working alongside several of my other brothers building Your Other Brothers to its greatest peak yet: a revamped website, a store, three regular podcasts, a TikTok, a Discord server, a book club, and several other Zoom calls and digital events each month.
The other day, five of our community members posted a picture of themselves having a beach campfire together, and I may have cried a little. I can’t quite put into words the beauty of that image: this little mustard seed of a website that has grown into something so meaningful for so many in just five years.
Praise be to God.
I’ve invested a lot of time online in the last year, but I know I can’t maintain that ratio. I can’t keep devoting more and more time to the Internet. I need to leap more beyond digital realms.
With spring coming and new hope being birthed by the day, I feel it more than ever: this urge, this need to step back into my city and do whatever the Lord is prompting me to do here.
I’m feeling as healthy as I’ve felt in a year’s time, and it feels eerily like I’m picking up where I left off last March — back before this coronavirus struck our country and this disease struck my bones.
It’s tempting to want to erase the last year, pretend it never happened. Strike it from the history books and carry on.
But consider how our years to come will forever be impacted by this one. By our action and our inaction.
Let us mourn the rot and death that’s been floating downriver for over a year now.
And then let us blaze a current upstream for the source, the remedy, new life.
