Walk a Mile--from my perspective

Something has happened in a small town in Mississippi in the last couple of weeks. This happened at the church I attend and where most of my family that lives in this area attends. This thing is that probably at least twenty members have become sick with COVID-19 during the last couple of weeks. This number may be even larger than this but might be hard to know because there doesn’t appear to be any tracing system that is being shared publicly with members (at least that I know about).

Needless to say, many (if not all) of us in this church are suddenly face-to-face with many emotional, mental and spiritual reactions to the news. There are questions about next steps and exposure. Was I exposed? Do I get tested? Should I quarantine? What about my family? What about my church family and friends? What do I need to do at this time? Why did this happen with so many getting sick at the same time? What went wrong? Is God punishing us? Will God make sure all of us recover?

Showing up in the hearts and bodies of many are now: fear, anger, disappointment, resignation, anxiety, blood pressure spikes, digestive upsets, and sleeplessness. Also, there is a review and judgement (at least internally in some) of what happened to cause this outbreak.

Top of the list is that there is a wide divide of those in the church who thinks masks are necessary for protection for self/others and those who don’t.

We are all neighbors even when we live thousands of miles apart. Our closest neighbors geographically, our church or town, may have more in common with us but we are still all very different. Our life experiences and our family experiences have formed who we are and how we process information is different because of these. We don’t all believe exactly the same thing. There is only one truth but we don’t always have all the data we need to know the whole truth. We sometimes only know bits and pieces that may be different than the bits and pieces others know. We are put in the position of having to make the best judgement we can with the help of God, the data we have and from the perspective we bring to the matter. The best we can do sometimes is just to make a list of all that we can find on the matter and then……

Walk a Mile in My Shoes! Joe South. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhw0lWpVZc

Start your list from the Bible and then look for experts who have gained high acclaim in their fields.

Galatians 6:7 7-8 Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God! —harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God’s Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life.

Deuteronomy 28 20 “The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and rebuke, in all [f]you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken Me.

1 John 5:14-15 14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and two colleagues wrote in an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association comments on masks. Because cloth face coverings can also allow states to more safely ease stay-at-home orders and business closings, Redfield told a JAMA Live webcast Tuesday, “If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really think in the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control.

These epidemiological observations are among the evidence that Gandhi and colleagues cite in a paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, in which they propose that masks can lead to milder or asymptomatic infections by cutting down on the dose of virus people take in. Monica Gandhi, MD, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco said, “The more virus you get into your body, the more sick you are likely to get.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8