Covid 19: March 11, 2020 - May 11, 2023

This past Sunday our pastor preached from John 16:16-24. In the passage, Jesus tells his disciples that in a little while they won't see him anymore, but in a little while after that He will return. One of the points our pastor made was that we can face many challenges if we know it's just for a little while.

Our president and governor and many health officials promised us that if we stayed home, wore a mask, and washed our hands for a little while that the pandemic would be over or at least contained. Two weeks plus two weeks plus two weeks added up to many weeks of quarantine and more than a year of masking.

I do not believe our elected officials knowingly lied to us. I think they, like the rest of us, had a lot of wishful thinking going on. None of us had ever lived through a pandemic, therefore none of us knew what to expect.

In mid-March of 2020, a friend of mine in the healthcare field said she had been told to expect the pandemic to stretch into July at least. The idea of this desperate not knowing stretching that long raised my anxiety. I can't imagine if we had really known how long it would last.

Three years feels like an eternity compared to two weeks.

Now we stand on the other side of a historic event. Not all of us who entered the pandemic exited it. We lost dear friends to this nasty disease, as did many of you.

The pandemic left scars on all of us. Our families. Ours kids' education. Our pocketbooks. Our businesses. Our mental health. Our physical health. Many of those scars will fade. Others we'll deal with for the rest of our lives.

We all have our pandemic story. Our grandchildren will ask us about it for a history project one day like I asked my papaw about his time in WWII. We'll tell about food shortages, quarantine orders, and over crowded hospitals. I pray our grandchildren will not understand how that could have happened.

On May 11, 2023, President Biden is expected to allow the emergency declaration over the pandemic to expire.

It feels a bit anticlimactic, but I, for one, am glad to say "don't let the door hit ya on the way out" to this pandemic.