how our family has faced COVID and the quarantine.

Someone asked the other day what Coronavirus and the quarantine have looked like for us, so I thought I'd share!

It has been weird for a family of our size (though I know it has been weird for everyone).  I have made a conscious decision not to 'panic-buy,' not to stock up on things because I'm afraid I won't be able to find them later.  When I grocery shop every three weeks, I have made a point to only purchase what we will use in the next three weeks.  I did, at one point, ask my mom to sew us some cloth wipes in case we would get low on toilet paper and not be able to find any, but I'm not kidding you when I say that we are still working our way through TP I had purchased prior to all the chaos.  Our TP supply has been like the widow's oil, and is it weird to say I think it's been supernatural provision?

My goal through all of this has been to remain positive, optimistic, and level-headed.  It has not been easy every step of the way, and there are still many days where I am tempted to worry about what the future holds after all of this dies down.  And tangibly speaking, there was a stretch at the beginning during which it was genuinely stressful to find enough food for our family's basic needs.  Either stores were sold out of items, or were limiting certain things.  (Two cans of tuna per customer?! My kids eat six cans in a single lunch.)  When it was possible to find the things I needed in the quantity I needed, I felt self-conscious about how much I was buying.  Our normal grocery trip looks staggering to outsiders, and I didn't want to look like I was afraid, or was taking more than my share.  But God was faithful through all of that - either I was able to find what we needed, we were able to stretch or limit what we were using, or friends were so kind to gift us things they were able to find.  We were given things like commercial-sized cans of tuna, bags of potatoes, baby wipes, rice, and toiletries.  God has been really good to us.

Currently, there is no longer an issue with finding resources.  The main concern most people seem to have at this point regards masking, not hoarding.  Since we have chosen not to mask (not that we really ever go anywhere anyway), this makes things much simpler for us than they were at the beginning. 

It has been a weird time for the kids.  If it wasn't for our trips to the Amish each week, they would not have left the house for the last three months.  That has been wearing on them.  They beg to just go to the grocery store with Todd or me, but many of our local places still have restrictions on the number of people allowed per cart.  They also are trying to make sense of a lot of the fear they sense around them.  But all things considered, they have been absolute champs about it all.  We are trying to teach them with our words and our example that we are choosing not to live in fear, and that we can be a blessing to others by remaining levelheaded.

We have received so many gifts through all of it, though, and that's what I really want to remember about this time.  Todd has been working from home since mid-March, and it has been a fantastic transition.  We are praying this can be a permanent option.  He was also scheduled to have to spend a work week in Tennessee without us this summer, but his company has arranged for all of his 'on-location' meetings to be held via Zoom, and he gets to do them from home instead.  While we have missed our friends and family through all of this, we also really reveled in the slower pace of life we were given.  I'm actually not really ready to give that part up!

We took so many family walks, especially at the beginning!

At the end of the day, what all do I believe about this time in history?  I believe the virus is definitely very dangerous for some, but not all.  I think that much of our quickness to take action in shutting things down on the front end was due to some founded caution, but also a fear of the unknown, and I do think it was overblown.  I think the media coverage and CDC reporting of numbers has been suspect, and has not promoted levelheaded assessment by Americans of their true risk.  

I think the social consequences of all of this - the increasing trend of young school children watching an alarming rate of pornography during their many unsupervised hours at home, for instance, or the absolute travesty of blanket-isolating the elderly from human contact, even when we know that that itself puts people at severe risk of illness and death (and then denying them the dignity of a funeral), or the increase in depression and suicides, or the rampant job loss among the financially vulnerable - are a bit enraging, to be honest, and I think that to care about health outcomes of individuals is more multidimensional than the rhetoric about social distancing and masking would lead you to believe.  

I think fast-tracking and potentially mandating a vaccine, using fetal cell lines and without doing adequate safety testing, is a huge mistake with both moral and societal considerations.

So overall, I'm about as skeptical of all of this as an optimist can be.  I'm a recovering cynic, and by God's grace I won't allow myself to lapse over something like this, but I do find it all very sobering.

Nothing a couple smiling cuties can't fix, though.

I am not basing my opinions on the unfounded hope that it's not really spreading, or that I'm unlikely to get it.  At this point, it seems inevitable that most of us will contract it.  I will probably contract it at some point, statistically speaking, and I am not afraid.  The reality is that COVID is a virus that is here to stay, and we have to make our peace with that.  Luckily for us, it has a 99.7% survival rate, so theoretically we should be able to move forward whenever we're ready to face that good news head on.

All that to say, though, I am not responsible for the whole world.  I am responsible for my little tiny corner of the world.  And in this corner, the same things are true in any circumstance that might come our way: we fight for joy here.  We fight for optimism.  We seek faithfulness and obedience and love.  We are basking in the undeserved favor and countenance of God, even when things out there get hard.  And I will choose, every day, to make sure these are the Truest things, to keep them in front of my eyes and at the forefront of my mind.  That's my duty and my joy.