So, recently I have been accused on Facebook of thinking only of the sickness part of this COVID 19 crisis. Excuse me, I work with the sick. Would anyone working with the sick right now be thinking of vacationing in the Bahamas? Maybe so but they wouldn't actually be doing it, I would hope anyway!
I guess I don't have anyone coming to my door asking for food or money. If that was going on, it would be easier for me to grasp the financial aspects of this situation we find ourselves in. I'm not saying that I want anyone to be suffering financially, only that I am unaware of anyone who is.
Just this afternoon I asked a friend if she needs a loan at the moment. She does daycare and has far fewer children to watch as only essential workers have been working this month. I said that she can pay me back when she gets her stimulus check. She repeatedly refused even a penny but I asked her to let me know if that changes!
So perhaps my friend is unusual. Maybe there are millions of people who would "Like to get their hands on my money," as I was made aware of years ago by a financial expert. Sometimes it's hard to know how to help others.
When this first started, and I got the virus, I knew that the best thing for me to do was to stay away from everyone and rest and take care of myself and my family's health needs. Then I recovered but was still weak. I knew that I couldn't take the chance of being out in public where I might be exposed to something else as my immune system grew stronger again.
As I grew stronger, I needed to be able to shop as my guys are still harvesting last year's crops. So I put on my mask and gloves and drove the hour to the city and got groceries. It felt so good to be "Normal" again. I was glad to see that almost everyone else in the store was wearing a mask, too, and many wore gloves.
Now that I'm fully recovered, and am doing many sessions in my home office these days, the question remains. How can I help in a bigger way in this world-wide crisis? I've turned to writing again for that release of my pent-up ideas.
I've written a letter to the editor clearly portraying the political bullying going on in our District. This was in defense of our good friend, who is being lied about, and I want it to stop!
I've been asked to write a letter to businesses, medical facilities, and schools to encourage them to make Online BodyTalk Access classes available to their people. My friend is an Instructor who can teach these classes and I want everyone to know how much doing BodyTalk Access can help with health issues. Indeed, it saved my life in 2007 when I was trying to recover from shingles on the brain. This is my next writing project but, seeing as I lack direction, I'm waiting on that.
I write daily on Facebook but those thoughts, like I mentioned at the start of today's comments, are appreciated less and less. Did you see my post about rising grumpiness that I shared last week? So I turn to my blog readers for a reason to keep sharing. After all, we writers must write.
I suppose it may be naive of me to think that you are any different than my Facebook friends. I'm sure that you all have your opinions too but, so far anyway, I haven't been chided here for being too "Sickness conscious" or too "Happy conscious" or too "Sad conscious" or too "Politically conscious".....
With all of that said, I may have made you nervous unnecessarily to see what I am going to share today. Actually it is quite calming. YAY Anyway, I was encouraged to think of this fella's grandmother living through so much. How did she do it? She had to.
Some day, when those who come after us read about what living through COVID 19 was really like, they will be amazed at our faith! They will look at our stories and say, "Wow, how could people keep going when evil had gained such a foothold in the world? I want my descendants to look at my life and see what this man sees in the story of his grandmother's life!"
After you read the story, I'll share a song with you. I sang it at my mother's family service the night before her funeral. I could only sing it because I truly want my children to see a life of faith in God when they look at my life!
Now is the time to take out our faith and polish it until it glistens. Let's wipe the cobwebs off of it and let it shine for all the world to see! Those who have gone before us have left us that legacy. We can do no less!
Happy Sabbath,
Dawn
The little girl in the middle was named Wanda. She was born in 1912 to two Swiss immigrants. Her father was a blacksmith, and they lived outside Yakima, Washington.
There was a water pump in the backyard. She’s sitting on her mother’s lap in this photo:
The Chinese Empire had just ended, Russia was ruled by a czar, and the Ottoman empire was intact.
She was two when The Great War (WW I) began, and six before it ended.
That’s when the Spanish Flu hit, infecting 500 million people and causing 50 million deaths worldwide.
She was a teenager when Mussolini came to power.
It wasn’t until she was sixteen that Sir Alexander Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus and discovered penicillin by accident.
A year later Wall Street crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.
When she was eighteen, the Star Spangled Banner was adopted as our National Anthem, and the Empire State Building was constructed.
When she turned 21 FDR was just putting the New Deal in place, and Adolf Hitler had just become chancellor of Germany. Later that year prohibition was repealed.
A couple years later Johnson and Goodpasture demonstrated that mumps is contagious.
She went to nursing school in Seattle, graduating just before her 24th birthday.
The next year Japan invaded China, the Hindenburg crashed, and Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
She was 29 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next year, at 30, she joined the Army (Women’s Army Corps). She was sent on a boat to India.
She met a chemist serving as a quartermaster, and in September, 1944, at the age of 32, she married him in Cuttack, India, in the middle of a war, far from home and family.
By the time she turned 34, she was home from the war and giving birth to her first daughter.
Her daughter faced a plethora of perilous childhood diseases: mumps, measles, polio, etc. Polio crippled 35,000 people a year. In the late 1940s polio outbreaks grew, and “parents were afraid to let their children go outside …travel and commerce between affected cities were sometimes restricted.” (Link)
It wasn’t until all her children had been born that a vaccine started to make a difference. And then at 45 this mother of four faced the 1957 Asian Flu, which killed 1–2 million people worldwide.
In 1962 Wanda and her husband took their daughters on a cross-country drive to visit the Seattle World’s Fair. They saved a copy of the Seattle Times, which had a prediction about “Talking Books” in the 21st century:
Thirty years later Wanda would play a part in making that prediction a reality.
Her daughters grew up in a scary world. In elementary school they practiced ‘Duck and Cover’ drills in the event of a nuclear attack; neighbors built bomb shelters and stockpiled toilet paper. Their father was recalled by the Army to serve in the Korean War. As teenagers they lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the chaos of the 60s. Their classmates were sent to Vietnam.
In the 1970s, the world was falling apart. The economy was a mess; the stock market lost 50% in less than two years. Passenger flights were frequently hijacked. The president of the United States was resigned. Oil prices soared, and gasoline was rationed. “Doctors only” read the sign in one gas station window: we needed to prioritize resources for healthcare workers.
At least polio was eliminated in the United States by 1979; none of Wanda’s six grandchildren had caught it before then.
In 1981 there was a recession; the 30-year mortgage rate hit 18.63%. But the recession ended, as all recessions do, and the decade boomed, and technology took off. The personal computer industry was in full swing.
In 1990–91 there was another recession, but Wanda, now widowed, was still able to loan one of her grandsons a little money to invest in her other grandson’s small business idea. Again, the recession ended and the economy boomed. The Internet was popularized and everything went digital.
She lived to see the dotcom crash and then the September 11th attacks, during yet another recession. In 2004 Facebook was created, and in 2007, Wanda died in the house her husband built, where she raised her daughters and lived for more than half a century — just a month before the iPhone was introduced.
Sometimes I worry.
I worry about catching COVID-19. I worry about being able to meet payroll if sales fall. I worry about letting down Faithlife’s employees, customers, and investors. I worry about disappointing my wife, going bankrupt, needing a job, losing the house, and being embarrassed by bad decisions or poor judgment or having ‘failed’ in business.
But I don’t worry for long. Because I’ve read a lot of history, and I know that scary unknowns aren’t unique to our present circumstances. We actually live with a lot more knowledge, understanding, and predictability than people have throughout history. (We don’t worry, for example, that the neighboring people group will invade and kill us all next week. Our cities don’t need walls.)
And when that historical perspective seems too remote to speak to my scary circumstances, I think about Wanda, who lived through pandemics and depressions and the fall of empires, who saw the rise of Hitler and the destruction of Europe and who went to a war on the other side of the world and then came home to bring children into a world of horrible diseases and the fear of nuclear annihilation.
And I think about how this woman who saw the world turned upside down more than once is the same woman I knew as “Mom-Mom”, who tended her flower garden every day and gave me chocolates and liked to put cheddar-cheese-spread on toasted English muffins, which I loved.
And who loaned some of the money that let me quit my job and work full time on Logos Bible Software, which helps scholars sitting in their homes study records stored in libraries in London and Rome.
Yes, the pandemic is a big event.
One more big event in what I expect will be a lifetime full of big events.
My grandmother, with my children.
No comments:
Post a Comment