Reflections from Quarantine

Kate, the girls, and I recently had the chance to lead the church retreat for All Saint’s Parish Chevy Chase. It was a delightful weekend spent with lovely people in North East, MD at the tip top of the Chesapeake. Our theme for the weekend was about how God uses our weakness to shine his light to the world. It is the counter-intuitive nature of the Gospel that says it is not our strength and success that testifies to God’s goodness and grace, but rather our weakness and failure. As humans we naturally don’t like this because all of our time is spent trying to be strong and successful. We don’t like weakness. We want to suppress it or cover it up and present ourselves as capable, productive, and attractive people. We think strength = acceptance and weakness = rejection. And reflexively we try to avoid rejection at all costs.

Well, it was not without a small amount of irony that I came away from this retreat contracting COVID-19 and was forced to face my weakness in yet another area of life. Thankfully, it was not a super-spreader event, but we learned the Monday after the retreat that one of the other kids of the church had developed COVID and about a dozen of us from the weekend contracted it. Kate and the girls somehow came away unscathed, but not me. That Monday evening I started to have a sore throat, so I tested myself the next day. After over 2 years of symptom scares only to repeatedly test negative, I was shocked to actually see two lines on my test strip. I had joined the vast majority of our country, and at this point the world, and had the coronavirus.

I don’t know what variant we are on at this point, but it is significantly weaker than previous ones and for that I am thankful. What I experienced this past week was basically a 5 day flu. Headache, congestion, fever, general achey-ness, and fatigue. I am on the other side of it now, though I am still quarantined until day 10 because I still tested positive after 5 days. Looking back on the experience it is just another testament to how much I hate being weak. No one likes to be sick. Sure, there’s the memory of getting to stay home from school as a kid, which was always great, especially if you felt bad, but not too bad so that you could watch the Price is Right and movies and such. I mean a kid’s sick day is the entire premise of The Princess Bride, which is an absolute classic, so there are some upsides to being sick. The introvert dream of not having to go anywhere or do anything or see anybody and just veg out on the couch can be fun….but only for a day or two. It gets very old after 5 to 10 days, especially when you feel so rotten you can’t even watch anything. You just have to lie still and hope to fall asleep.

Sickness always brings up that feeling of powerlessness…the sense of being out of control. But COVID-19 exaggerated that feeling. I found myself putting on a pretty confidant exterior that thought I would bounce back pretty fast, but there was always the sneaking suspicion and fear that I might get really sick. I didn’t know what to expect. All I had to go on was the innumerable articles that I read over the past couple of years and the myriad anecdotal stories from others about how this is supposed to go. My addiction to comparison was alive and kicking. I knew a couple of other folks that had it at the same time as me, and I couldn’t help but evaluate myself against them. They seemed to be fairing much better than I was.

Around day 4 I really started to wonder. I wasn’t bouncing back like I thought I would. I still felt really out of it, and I still had a lingering fever. And I started to play the familiar old shame game. What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I recovering as fast as so and so? And the quiet fear mutated into What if I develop Long COVID? We have a friend that got sick in late 2020 and was still dealing with rather debilitating symptoms over a year later. The unpredictability of it all just kept throwing my weakness into my face. I had no control over this thing. My solution…read more articles! More information will solve this! We as humans like to think that knowledge will give us what we are looking for…more power over this thing…whatever the thing happens to be at the moment. It was one of the main lessons in one of my favorite Disney cartoons growing up, The Sword in the Stone. Merlin schooled young Wart (who would become King Arthur) with the helpful and fun aid of magic. And Wart got the lesson, “Knowledge and wisdom is the real power.” So, in my quest for power over my situation I read a study by University of Chicago Medicine that found 40% of people who had COVID still test positive after 5 days. I was part of the 40%. Yay knowledge! Didn’t change my situation at all, but did put some of the comparison non-sense to rest.

My symptoms did actually improve on day 5. My fever went away, and I started to feel a bit better. But here on day 8 I am still not 100%. I still have that foggy head feeling (so be gentle if this post is littered with typos and nonsensical thoughts) and my energy is not as high as normal. But my fears have largely subsided and have been replaced with frustration. Now that I’m feeling better I have connected with all of the things I had planned to do this past week that remain undone. I have had at least 2 official hissy fits about not being able to run the errands I want to, and I continue to be confronted with how much stock I put in being productive. I actually had to hire someone to come and do yard work this week because I wasn’t able to. I know that’s not a big deal for many, but I’m used to doing it, and I even like doing it…taking care of our property. But it was just one more example of how I do not like being weak. I do not like asking for help. I do not like being needy. But I am.

The law of COVID has been a mirror reflecting back to me just a fraction of my neediness, and as I said, I hate it. It is so uncomfortable. It reminds me of a definition of sanctification I heard in seminary years ago: “Sanctification is the process of getting used to our justification.” What does that mean? Sanctification, which means “to make holy,” is all about getting used to the fact that God has forgiven and saved me completely in Jesus Christ (justification). We spend our whole lives coming to grips with this amazing truth again and again and again. Each new event or situation confronts us with our powerlessness our weakness and our absolute addictive tendency to think otherwise. We are convinced that we have our crap together or at least we are convinced that we are supposed to have our crap together in order to be loved, so we proceed to apply more will power, more effort, more knowledge, etc., etc. But God in his mercy uses life and all of its unpredictability to strip away this illusion. He confronts us with our lack of power. He confronts us with our weakness, with our need. And our response is the same as it has always been…fear. It terrifies us! We think we’re going to be rejected because of our weakness and ultimately destroyed by it. How could anyone love the naked us? But that is exactly where Jesus comes for us. He sends a preacher right into that place. He tells us through his word or through a friend or maybe even through an actual preacher in an actual church that he is powerful for us. He has already taken care of everything for us. And we are clothed in him.

It is only in our weakness, in our nakedness, that we really hear him. In your weakness you come to know his strength. Only in your weakness can you hear you are forgiven. He forgives you, he loves you, he justifies you, he sanctifies you.

Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:8-10

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