I grieve the losses small business in my town are taking
The life altering changes college students are facing
The doctors and nurses and grocery workers and the sacrifices they are daily making
Yet
When the spring snow comes
And 2 boys make plans, calculating their school assignments and class requirements. Fill me in on the way the timing will work, the supplies they need, the adjustment to meals they’d prefer (we want to work till dark, then we’ll come in and eat dinner, we’ll start first thing in the morning and work on school at noon)
And they go out and build an igloo in this perfectly packable 8” of snow?
Oh the joy!
Had we been operating according to our regularly scheduled programming, today would have looked more like a conversation in the car wondering if the snow will still be there when the school day ended.
In Colorado, it hits like a train wreck, but clears away much faster.
but we have been forced home, paving the way for today’s igloo building by 2 brothers soon to be leaving the nest. All the words about all the plans, the engineering decisions, the explanations; “wow zeke that’s brilliant!”, instead of mere imaginations of what could be if the sun could hide some of her strength, are actual reality!
And I wonder
After this is all over
Will we all return to the way things were? Will we have learned and grown more balanced? Will we value relationships over productivity? Will we understand the lifelong benefits of bonding experiences? Will we be open to them when they come, willing to flex and disappoint the powers that be for what really matters in the right now?
These are the questions I ask myself. I lean towards duty bound, loyalty, integrity and strong work ethic. These things are valuable-essentials. Yesterday morning was a duty morning of boys shoveling when they’d rather be warm and still in bed. It’s not an abandoning of that I’m questioning. It’s walking in the nuanced balance of the Holy Spirit who gives strength for the drudgery hard work, and courage for the invited play.
This virus has stretched us all, but when the rubber band snaps back, will we take on our former form, or will our shape have changed from the stretching?
will I remember this day, and have the courage to cancel school myself and allow these boys to stay home and play? The consequences would be steep-for one at the community college and the other well into his high school NHS career.
Would a teacher at the high school have freedom to take the students outside and have a lesson in igloo building because the materials have fallen at his door and won’t last till tomorrow? Would that courageous decision bear more impact than anything he does all year? Would those students remember that day and the lessons they learned for the rest of their lives?
Could that be the new normal we aspire to? A new flexibility. Permission to be human? Valuing the immense learning, bonding, health in perceived play?
It’s hard to say, and is yet another thing out of my control.
But what is in my control is today-to observe, to receive the joy in what has been given to us in the midst of the hard. to write it all down.
A spring snow in the time of corona
