I’ve been mulling some past history:

On March 8th, 2020, we held our last in-person Sunday service (a total of 22 COVID deaths had occurred in the U.S.).

On April 1st, the Board of Trustees decided to officially close the campus (deaths totaled 3,170 in the U.S. to that point).

In May, I ‘partially returned’ early from sabbatical to help Rev. Dennis McCarty with some pastoral tasks (George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25th).

On July 19th, Rev. Dennis ended his term as Sabbatical Minister as I officially returned from sabbatical (the U.S. had just recorded a world-record single-day rise of new cases, with 77,638 new infections reported on the 17th).

In early September, Dick Smith and I determined that we should begin working toward live-streaming rather than recording our services (on September 1st, the U.S passed the 6-million mark of reported COVID cases).

On December 24th, we posted a recorded Christmas Eve service featuring Grace Grote and the late Lori Baribeault, and hosted an online Christmas Party on Zoom (on January 1st, the U.S passed the 20-million-case milestone).

On February 7th, Dick Smith, Thom Reeves, and I successfully live-streamed the first service held on a Sunday morning since the previous March (by that morning, COVID deaths in the U.S. totaled 445,000).

As I write a sermon for February 21st and prepare this column for the March 2021 newsletter, I read that the total reported cases of COVID in the U.S. are approaching 28 million, with the total number of deaths near 500,000.

The counselor side of me might ask, “And how does that make you feel?” Of course having lived through the history I’ve just recited, I’m going to be emotional. Wouldn’t anyone be?

There are positive signs, though: more and more of us are finding ways to get a vaccination.  New-case numbers have turned down in the past few weeks as has the number of deaths as well as the occupancy levels of local ICUs. So there’s that.

We’re all desperately tired of this pandemic and the closeness and connections we’ve lost because of it. It’s not going to be easy coming out of the hole we’ve been in. The next few weeks or months are not going to be a walk in the park, no matter what.

As we struggle to decide when it will be safe enough to gather face-to-face again, we need to remember what we’ve been through, and the dangers we’re still facing, and how hard this has been on every one of us.

Let’s give each other a break, shall we? Hasn’t it been hard enough already? From my perspective, it certainly has.

See you in church, not if, but when,