Those of you who read my last blog post, “Homesick,” are aware that this is the second installment in a two-part series that discusses the lessons I’ve learned from the fallout of COVID-19.  It’s my prayer that these blogs will encourage you as we live this shared experience together.  

Give me five seconds and I’ll give you twice that many complaints about quarantine.

Confession time:  when I first heard about the stay-at-home order, it didn’t sound so bad.  In fact, it seemed downright halcyon on the surface.  No work.  No commuting.  No finagling out of social events (you know, the ones you don’t want to attend but can’t politely decline either).  No schedules to keep, deadlines to meet, people to please, or problems to solve.

Alluring (and, I now realize, completely unrealistic) visions came to mind of leisurely sipping tea (which, by the way, I don’t drink) and perusing novels.  Or indulging in long hikes over the mountains, gleaning blog inspiration.  Or enjoying fun-filled evenings with my family—movies, board games, jigsaw puzzles?  (I think we’ve all discovered that you can, in fact, have TOO much quality time with loved ones.)  After all, with all my free time, shouldn’t this seem almost like a vacation?  

I have now been in quarantine for exactly 63 days (not that I’m counting or anything), and this is my emphatic statement to my naïve self of two months ago:  You fool.

Quarantine, you see, is not a jubilee.  It’s a jail.  And it’s filled with enough pitfalls and perils to make my head spin.  However, I’m still learning some hard yet valuable lessons through all of this.  Here are just a few of the things COVID-19 has taught me:

1. It is possible to shop by proxy.  My father is especially fond of going to get groceries and then FaceTiming my mother and me to show us the selection available.  I don’t know if he’s soliciting our advice on what to buy or rubbing in the fact that he is in a real, actual store.  I hold that phone and drink in the sight of the aisles behind him as though he’s standing on a white sand beach in Aruba.

2. The American public apparently will sacrifice their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for a handful of essentials.  From our family’s experience, these essentials seem to be the incongruous combination of toilet paper, fresh meat, cat food, and car batteries.  

3. God left off the Eleventh Commandment, but it is worthy of being included in the canon:  Thou Shalt Not Hoard.  Please.  There are about 3 billion other people out here too.

4. People frequently complain about the news, but in the midst of a crisis, it takes on a mollifying role akin to a pacifier.  Also, the media seems more than ok with that.

5. My house is a lot smaller than I thought it was.  

Obviously, these lessons are tongue-in-cheek.  But behind the laughs, the general truth remains for me, as it does for you as well:  our lives have been detonated.  Humor, for me, is just one way of attempting to deal with the fallout.  

Because there is a lot of fallout.  This virus dances in a strange dichotomy.  On one hand, things feel incredibly urgent.  We’re all living on what seems like the border of Armageddon, teetering on the verge of a New World Order unlike what we’ve seen before.  We’re assaulted with an hourly flood of bad news and constantly ambushed by panic.  Yet on the other hand, the situation is unbearably boring.  We’re trudging through weeks in which the days run together, days in which time seems fluid, months of our lives spent in a state of hibernation.  

Because of that, quarantine (all jokes about it aside) feels most like a flat and dreary holding state—as if I’m alive but without a life, free-floating in time and place.  And so, in the desperate need to retain some semblance of sanity, to keep the frayed edges of my nerves intact, I’ve become addicted to a new activity—outdoor walks.

Rest assured, I still go for my daily run, chasing solitude for four miles down a deserted country road.  But later in the afternoon, my family and I take our dogs and begin an unhurried ramble.  

Our route varies but usually encompasses the expansive cow pastures near our house, where birds sing from the bushes and the cattle show a peaceful apathy to world events.  We move from there to a nearby lake, waters ruffled from a gentle breeze and frogs singing melodically from the banks.  In the evening twilight, we can watch purple martins zipping over the waters, their shrill whistles zinging in the air.  Lastly, we find ourselves in a stately forest, trees arching over the path like paternal guardians bending to whisper secrets.  

These walks restore my soul in a way I didn’t understand until recently.  I knew that I could leave for a walk irritated, weary, or downright distraught and return calm, happy, and filled with an indefinable sense of security.  However, I didn’t know why.  Then one evening, my mom and I were discussing the ramble we’d had that day.  Like me, she insisted that the walks were helping her maintain equilibrium.  But then she went on to explain why.

“You know,” she mused, “The walks are nice because they’re restful.  We’re used to working when we’re outside.”

I didn’t understand, so she explained:  “Running, hiking—those are fun, and we love them, but they’re still work.  But the walks are just rest.”

She was right.  Immediately I realized what the walks held for me that hiking or running didn’t.  it was the element of grace—the permission to not strive, but simply thrive.

Oh, I love hiking, and I couldn’t live without my running.  But each carries a certain set of expectations—an unseen judgment regarding how far or fast I should go.  I’m enjoying the experience, but I’m also pushing myself to beat a time or climb a mountain or reach a goal.  But the walks?  I’m just wandering—no need to measure distance.  And who cares how long it takes?  Since I pause frequently to admire birds or take in the view, I’m neither setting records nor aiming to do so.

In a way, it’s a poignant metaphor.  At one time, my life was most comparable to a run or a hike—a specific journey, with a single purpose, accomplished at an efficient rate of speed.  Now, it’s been reduced to a walk—a leisurely, lingering stroll, devoid of destination.  The pace is far slower than it was, but I’m finding to my astonishment that it’s filled with beauty—beauty that perhaps I didn’t notice or appreciate before. 

I can’t ignore the questions:  before COVID pushed pause on my life, was I so focused on living that I forgot about simply being?  And what if maybe, just maybe, this whole situation is a way for God to grind the brakes on our hectic velocity and give us a rest?  What if, when we’re used to running and hiking, He wants us to walk with Him?

These questions are sobering, because we are trained to live at a frenetic pace.  Our phones run on 5G; website loading time has been shaved to fractions of a second.  Our microwaves cook a frozen slice of meat in less than a minute.  Our businesses feature express checkouts and automatic doors and drive-thru windows.  Our roads, even with ever-rising speed limits, have passing lanes to oblige impatient drivers.  The pace we maintain is killing us, but even as we pant with exhaustion, we constantly search for ways to raise the tempo yet further.  

But now, things are different.  Our world hasn’t just been slowed; it’s been completely stalled.  We can’t complain about traffic because we’re not driving.  We can’t mutter about long lines at the stores because they’re closed.  We can’t even sneak a glance at our watch during our pastor’s sermon; churches are empty.  God slammed a gate across the track and called off the race.  And suddenly, the world that was loud and demanding, the world that was beeping phones and honking horns and impatient voices, is completely empty.

And in this emptiness, what voice will we heed?  

We have two options.  The first one is the one I followed during the initial few weeks of quarantine, and I suspect it’s familiar to many of you as well.  This choice is to frantically search for ways to stuff the silence.  Compulsively check news reports.  Fret over postponed plans.  Wander aimlessly around the house and groan as we imagine how “far behind” (by whose standard?) we’re falling.  We’re wasting time!  We need to be doing something!  

But then there’s the second choice.  

This one is hard to accept, because it completely goes against all our human tendencies.  This one is to accept the silence.  Now, I’m not suggesting that we assume a laissez-faire attitude and passively become a victim of circumstances.  What I’m saying is that we stop our own striving and open ourselves to the possibility that even here, even now, God could be speaking.

And if God is speaking, then what does He say?  What He has always said:  “In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15 KJV).

In quietness.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed a lot of quiet lately.  Quiet in stores…in streets…even in churches.  And quiet is unfamiliar to us, even downright threatening.  

Yet God says that quiet is our strength.  And if so, then that means that we can choose to wait for Him in this time.  Our inclination is always to cram tasks into our fragile days like a tourist jamming a week’s worth of belongings into a tiny carry-on.  But in this time, we’ve been given a bittersweet gift—the gift to be empty so that He can fill us.  The gift to be silent so He can speak to us.  The gift to walk instead of run.  

But there’s dualism in this verse:  “In quietness and in confidence will be your strength” (emphasis mine).  Quietness—allowing God space to speak.  And confidence.  In what?  In ourselves?  Certainly not.  In our elected officials?  I don’t recommend it.  In the latest timetable for when we can all get back to “normal”?  Probably not.  This is confidence in none other than the God of all the universe.  

You see, these two have to dance hand-in-hand.  One cannot be divorced from the other.  Quietness before God produces trust in God.  And trust in God—that He is working, that He is present, that He will not abandon us—gives us the serenity we need to embrace quiet.  

The rest we’ve been offered through this situation isn’t embodied in an apathetic attitude.  It isn’t encapsulated by wearing pajamas all day or vegging out on TV or neglecting basic chores.  Instead, it’s once again best exemplified by my daily walks.  During my walks, I don’t strain to reach a destination or analyze my route or weep because I’m not running.  I tune my soul to the slower cadence, and I walk hand-in-hand with God.  I talk with my family, I admire the beauty of the green and growing world, and I occasionally spot a beautiful bird singing from the treetops.  I can’t cover as much ground as I can when I am running, but that’s ok.  There’s enough glory here for me.  

I wander along the margin of the lake, watching the sun sprinkle the water with glitter, and I’m reminded of Jeremiah 29.  In this passage, the Israelites are begging for an explanation.  They’ve been uprooted from their promised homeland, dumped in a strange land, and subdued by a powerful nation.  Like us, they are asking for answers, for deliverance, for a tangible action they can take that will turn things around.  Yet God’s answer returns with a surprisingly anticlimactic twist:  Go on with your daily lives.  I have good plans, but you can’t see them—not yet.  Invest in the present moment.  When the time is right, I promise I’ll bring a change.  

Do I know what God’s doing?  Do I have a mirror to His mind?  Of course not.  But while we wait, let’s approach this with quietness and confidence.  I know I’m hearing Him—especially in the evenings when I look over the gentle swells of the lake and once again offer my soul to a God Who invites me to walk with Him beside the still waters.  

Did you enjoy this post? What are some ways you’re learning to accept this slower pace? Let me know in the comments!

Also, I have some great news–my friends the Wild Brothers have released the first episode of their BRAND-NEW vlog, “The Wild Way”! This vlog still features the faith-building philosophy and beautiful cinematography of all the Wild Brothers productions with a new twist: an examination of how we as believers can live out our values and impact our culture right here in the United States. Throughout this new series, the Wild Brothers will be reminding Christians everywhere that we don’t have to travel to faraway countries to experience God’s handiwork and share His message; we can touch the lives of others as close as our own neighborhood. Be sure to check out the new episode, and don’t forget to subscribe to their YouTube channel to stay up-to-date on all their releases!