Fantasize with me for a moment.
Remember all those times – and you know they are many – when you longed and even prayed for just a little time away from others, a little time to sit on your own in silence, a little time when overdue work and family demands and the need for groceries and a nagging obligation to respond to messages weren’t hanging over you like gloomy, heavy, late-winter weather? You imagined, perhaps, just sitting in a favorite or dreamed-of place, with coffee or tea or cold drink in hand, in silence and solitude. Push a little further and imagine if that scenario could be guilt-free. You’re not there on a momentary escape from the “real” world obligations, leaving kids or job-duties to be fulfilled by others (or un-done, growing uglier and more overwhelming with time ignored). You’re there with complete permission – even direction. You’ve been ordered to sit still, alone, and told that even if the world turns upside-down, you’re not to invade others’ space to help them nor seek their company to commiserate.
Maybe your fantasy involves an all-expense paid trip to a deserted island for a day or a week. “I just need to get away from it all … just for a little while.”
The nightmare happening around the world today is no dreamy fantasy. It centers around sickness and death; it’s bringing fear everywhere; it’s upending and maybe even destroying much about our way of life as we know it, as we collectively shut down, pull up drawbridges and fortify our castles big and small, and pray “when will it end?” This isn’t a fantasy; it’s a nightmare.
But…
Yes, “but”.
But… perhaps there’s something we can take advantage of within this nightmare. Not in a way that exploits others, but as the “silver lining” we long to find in every cloud.
What if we chose to receive a mandate to “isolate” and “social distance” ourselves from others as a rare opportunity to pull up a chair and draw near to someone guaranteed not to have a virus? Amidst very real and heartfelt pandemic fears and preservation-focused actions, what if we were given real permission to “take a moment” with God – permission in the most freeing sense possible? We must remain isolated from others, or at least most others. We must remain at home. We can work, but our tendency to escape to work or idolize our work is broken with the shattering of our office-centered routine. We have – almost eerily – we have time on our hands. Netflix isn’t doing it for us, at least not all of the time.
The unfamiliar and uncomfortable emptiness that we feel – what if we let it pull us, like a great Star Trek-ian tractor beam, toward the quietest, most isolated corner we can find. And sit. Or even better, kneel. And, with no-one else around, in our quietest whisper, say, “Hi God. It’s me. Can we talk?”