Every Covid Morning (Jarrell)

The days of Covid-19 fall from the calendar like loose photos from my grandma's old albums. I have a few sitting here on the table in the study. Touching the fuzzy black pages still sends shivers down my spine.

The earliest photos are black and white. Some are outlined with a frame, the month and the year printed along the bottom. In the early 1960s color finally comes to her albums and to her grandchildren in all their rosy-cheeked glory. After more than a half century, only a few well-behaved snapshots remain tucked in place, their four corners held squarely by tiny white triangles designed to bestow order. Or tell a story.

Every Covid morning I pick up the newly fallen day, the snapshot. I hold it out to see if it's in black and white or color. The ambition that gave my grandmother rosy-cheeked grandchildren now gives me the ability to continue to be a pastor, a voice, a rosy-cheeked face of hope for the discouraged and grieving crowds who gather around their computers in isolation.

I sit at my laptop and live-stream. I sit at my laptop seeing no one's face but my own. I look into that face and make promises of God's faithfulness. I tell stories of resurrection, of tombstones rolled away, of the dead now alive. I offer assurances of grace, of strength. I say straight from the scripture, "Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And what else matters?" Most viewers do not comment.

What I don't say to them are things like this. "I might be wrong about God." "I might be fooling myself." "I might be buying into the Jesus narrative to make myself feel better about suffering, insanity, poverty, exploitation, human trafficking, addiction, children in cages. Even Covid 19." "I could be making it up to make myself feel better about greedy old white men who seem to live forever and presidents who want to build walls but consider themselves entitled to grab any pussy within reach."

My doubt is a private story. A preacher's doubt is only fit for human consumption on special occasions and those occasions do not include pandemics. Because I did not make up this story, Jesus's story, which has changed lives, encouraged, comforted, inspired, sustained for two millennia. I don't say these things out loud for fear of doing harm. I don't say these things out loud because I need to believe in the goodness of God.

When the Covid evenings settle over me, I gently cradle the fallen day and tuck it back inside one of the photo albums not caring much if it finds its way home. I know lives, like stories, are not always linear, orderly. They do not always behave as directed. As I fall asleep I long to grab a fist full of days from June or July or August. I long to plot, to plan, to gloriously plan time to be with my rosy-cheeked grandchildren.

Never has an unknown felt so unknown.

Donna Jarrell has a Masters of Fine Art in Creative Writing and a Masters of Divinity and is an ordained minister in The United Church of Christ. Along the journey, she co-edited two anthologies published by Harcourt Brace. Her work appears regularly on Sundays at the church she pastors in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. She is married to Tom Young. They live on four lush acres in rural Pennsylvania and have a garden to die for.