We’re in this together--Carolyn R. Wilker

It’s true, we’re all in the pandemic together. The definition of a world-wide epidemic is an infectious ‘something’ in many corners of the world at once. Pandemic is both a noun and an adjective, a thing and a descriptor. But in my mind, it is also a verb, because actions and consequences come with it.

I awoke to a song line very early on Saturday morning, the tune in my head, “Will you be my refuge?” Carrie Newcomer’s CD collection A Permeable Life finally arrived in the mail after a long wait. I’ve been listening until I can almost sing along. The lyrics to this song, Haven, are on another album though. She’s asking God to be her haven in the storm, asking for direction and “holding me up” until she can continue on herself.

My friend in Colorado has her family-prescribed limitations and her adult kids get her groceries. A friend in Vancouver is watchful, too, since she’s just gone through surgery for cancer. Maryann and her husband John, in Nova Scotia, have their adult daughter with them from a group home at this time. Nova Scotians have also suffered numerous and unspeakable tragedies in the past few months. So many of them must be crying out to God for solace in these circumstances.

Carrie’s words float through my mind again, a “haven in the storm.” I like that picture of a quiet place where I can go when the world around me is crazy and mind-boggling.

Poet Luci Shaw said in a recent Renovaré webinar about creating in chaos, “God will honour our prayers of lament.” We’ve heard laments from many corners. 

If we, in privilege, can live and move around in our homes and on our properties, Carolyn Arends also recognized there are people who’ve lost jobs, whose lives are anything but comfortable right now. I think, too, of people who have died of covid, or other illnesses, and their families cannot hold a funeral or cry and weep on a friend’s shoulders.

Andrew Peterson, song writer and recording artist, said (on the webinar) that he was told during a time of great difficulty that God can take it when we cry out against him. Even the psalmists cried out at unfairness, but still they surfaced at the end with some thread of hope that kept them going. 

We have that hope in God that will carry us through these days. A haven in the storm, I like that term. Thank you, Carrie.

 

https://www.carolynwilker.ca/about/