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I wonder how life will be different after this season ends?

The closest corollary to this experience in my own life was my year in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan irrevocably changes how I perceive this present season. I suppose it’s impossible to have two identical seasons, since the first will always transform the next.

Like Afghanistan, day-to-day survival is the only available option. Deliberate change requires some margin in the messy transition. Without margin, any change I undergo is the effect of my environment. Change is inevitable in survival, but not deliberate. To this season’s transformation I am more a passive observer than an intentional actor.

Like Afghanistan, a community of shared experience is absent. It’s slightly better than Afghanistan, I’ll admit, but only barely. The battle-worn, apostolic parents of the pandemic are enclosed in their own bunkers, no more available to us than we are to them. Praise God, I still engage in meaningful community with a few who share part of our suffering, but it’s limited by circumstance and nearly constant sickness.

And like Afghanistan, the voice of God is conspicuously absent while the work of the Enemy is unrelenting. Weekly I encounter resistances that, due to their persistence and timing, are certainly demonically inspired. I experience momentary respite when our friends are especially careful to pray, but it’d take a dedicated stream of constant prayers to adequately protect against the onslaught - and for how long?

So I wait. I keep a flicker of hope alive, do what good I can, reject the Deceiver’s accusations, and grip the goodness of God in my teeth like a tenacious bulldog. For I am sure that no thing, though all whom I love be lost, though my bed were agony and my food tears, though my path were darkness and my days cut short; nothing shall separate me from Him in whom my soul delights. I will join my friend Job in the dust until the day of my vindication. I do not know what sort of person I shall be when I rise again, but I shall not be the same man who descended into the pit.

Alright Alex, your waxing a bit poetic don’cha think? Well, sometimes it takes a little poetry. Why don’cha go read a Psalm?