Many of you are surely sitting at home, uncertain of how things will progress over the next few weeks. I join you as one of them. I know I won’t be at school and my church duties will be significantly altered. But beyond that, it’s uncertain.
My friend Bill Doolittle often speaks of life being two concentric circles. On the inside are the things we can control, and that circle is often very small. On the outside in orbit are the things we cannot control, and that area is much bigger. We often spend our time worrying about the things in the outside circle because we wished we could control more things. The control is comforting, because we don’t trust in other things to handle those things we cannot control.
For example, we can’t control much about this coronavirus. We can’t control the fact that it exists, we can’t make it go away, and we can’t make our lives go back to normal, or even control what that normal will be. In the most extreme cases, there are aspects of our lives we can’t control now because of the virus. These are very legitimate concerns.
However, we can control how we feel about it, our reaction to it, and our influence on others about it. And the silver lining is that that control can be even more meaningful that those things we can’t control. For me, I find that even though I won’t be at school, and my church time will be significantly altered, I can rest a bit after what’s been a long, spring and a long year. I can get in some overdue organ practice, and prepare more significant preludes and postludes than I might’ve been able to do before. I can find new ways of engaging the worshiping community with social media and online sources. Perhaps I can also do some writing, work on my personal health, create some new habits, and maybe even get outside into the garden and start the spring cleaning early.
So in this time, I encourage you to find the silver lining, and find greater positive meaning in an otherwise stressful situation.