Happy Thanksgiving: Covid Edition (*sigh*)
And here it is. After months of mask-wearing, social distancing, and careful handwashing, it seems the dreaded Covid virus is floating around the bedroom right next to where I’m writing this.
When I pulled up to the garage yesterday afternoon, our beloved Young Son’s car was already in the garage—hours earlier than I expected—home early from college for Thanksgiving break. And when I knocked on his closed bedroom door, he announced that he’d been a little sick late last week, and today got results that he’d tested positive for the coronavirus.
He’s pretty sure he is fine, because he feels fine, he’s young, and because the test detected little antibodies swimming around his bloodstream. But a quick Google search suggests that medical experts aren’t sure if or for how long someone like Young Son might still be contagious.
It’s probably God’s revenge on us (and the wrath of Governor Walz and the good folks at the Minnesota Department of Health), since we were going to try to sneak Grandma in for Thanksgiving, along with our daughter and son-in-law and the little Sweetheart. We’d be only seven around a well-distanced Thanksgiving table, we rationalized, and we’d all been in a quasi-bubble with each other for weeks anyways.
But now that’s all out the window (oh yes, and we were going to open our windows on Thanksgiving, too). We’ve banished Young Son to his bedroom, Judy and I are wearing masks around the house, and the one thing we’d been looking forward to for weeks is not going to happen. About the only thing we’re feeling is: Really?
We’d already given up on our usual gathering of relatives, the joyous Thanksgiving Eve service and pie social at church, and all the interactions that happen this time of the year. But we still wanted to create belonging for our little family, and maybe deliver a meal to a single friend or two.
Faced with bad-news headline or other setbacks this fall, many of you are probably saying “Really?” as well. It reminds me of the “sacrifice of thanksgiving” the Hebrew Scriptures talk about in Leviticus 7—a peace offering of an animal sacrifice, along with various kinds of bread offered to God.
For some of us, Covid-19 is an inconvenience; for others it has meant lost wages or hunger, or grueling hours working in hospital ICUs, or severe illness—or even death.
Perhaps this year more than ever, God invites us to look through all our inconveniences, and even suffering, so we might reconsider what his Son has done for us. To recall Jesus, who put aside his own desire for family and friends so he could surrender his life-blood as a peace offering that would open the way for us to return to God and break down the walls of hostility we find so often between people (see Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 13-18).
It’s a gift he invites us to receive, and to be most thankful. And for this, we can be truly glad.