"Keep Going"

 (a coloring page that I have pinned to my bookcase)

It's 2021, and we're still in the middle of a pandemic. 

I haven't really talked about Covid-19 much on this blog, but here goes. My neighbor below me might have it, as I hear him (her?) coughing in the night and there seems to be a pretty stringent cleaning protocol going on in the halls. At one point, I realized someone was wiping down the outside of my apartment door. 

I have two people close to me that have it: a former neighbor from Pittsburgh, and someone from work. I wasn't sure if I had been exposed, so I quarantined over the Christmas break and took a test on Monday. Thankfully I was negative, but so many aren't that lucky. Omicron numbers are high, and people are saying that Biden has failed at ending the pandemic. 

And yet, life goes on, even if we are crawling through the fog. I do believe there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

But we are still waiting. And the crawling isn't easy. Today my phone devotional in the YouVersion app asked me to reflect on two questions: 

• God, what are you showing me in this waiting?
• How might I reclaim this waiting period for Your glory and the good of others? 

I've been talking about waiting in dating, and last night my friends reminded me that dating is a marathon, not a sprint. But I'm also waiting, with every person on this globe, for this damn pandemic to be over! Yesterday I started to get ready for my virtual story time later in January. (We do storytime on Facebook Live, Tuesday-Thursday at 10:30 EST). Because it will be posted online, I need to look up permissions from publishers to read their works. And while it helps me, it also makes me sad that permissions have now been extended by most publishers to June 30, 2022. That's six months away! Is that to say that we will still be in the pandemic in six months? I mean, ugh. 

And some people, with Long Covid, will be forever waiting for their strength to return, no longer able to run. It's really horrible. 

Last night I cried out to God for a parking space. And asking for that small thing, that He cares about, because He cares about me, prompted my heart to cry out for all the other things on my heart. Funny how it works that way. So there I was, on South 295, radio and GPS blaring, just calling out to God. 

And while I don't claim to have all the answers, my parking spot (after driving around the neighborhood in the dark) was indeed steps away from my final destination. And while I shared bread with my friends (OUTSIDE, socially distanced), they confirmed that enough was enough, I needed to let go of Mr. Saturday night. (see last post.) I needed to date "up." Wait for someone better. This was something I had been holding onto, and I had prayed about it, on 295. 

There's that cough again, coming through the floorboards. It stops me, cold. 

I know that the writing in this post is all over the place and not fleshed out. I know that given time, I could pull so much more out, make the paragraphs flow better, the transitions smoother. But it's 6:08, and I need to hit publish. 

And once again, as I look at the formatting, I realize that it may be time to take this blog to a different platform. I've been on Blogger since 2005! Old habits die hard, but maybe 2022 this blog will be on Word Press.