My mascot for the pandemic

The other day I drove to my children’s school to pick up free KN95 masks and home COVID tests. I pulled up, handed over a piece of paper with their names on it, and a man kindly reached through my open window and placed the free items in the car.

There they were, those tests, little bars of gold tucked into cardboard boxes.

As I drove away, I thought of how many times over the past two years I’ve done similar pick-ups—for yearbooks, for honor roll certificates, for devices for virtual learning…it’s not a short list. Each time, I think it might be the last time I do a drive-through school pick-up. But there’s always another one.

Every time hits differently. This time I hardly know how to feel.

It’s all gone on so long. Some days I feel like Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down, over and over and over. Other days I remind myself of the progress we’ve made, how the vaccine has offered me so much comfort and hope and peace—and health. I think of how my children climb onto a bus and go to school with their friends, and how we are back to Mass, reunited with the Eucharist and our parish community.

So many good things have happened. And they will continue to happen.

Still, I have to admit that I’m tired. Drained. Depleted. Ready to move on to a non-pandemic time. To a time without surges and positivity rates and worries about what we’re exposing ourselves and others to.

Then I picked up the latest issue of Smithsonian magazine, and I turned to a story about a bird, the Hudsonian godwit.

The godwit flies through the day and night for thousands and thousands of miles without stopping to sleep. It shuts half its brain off and keeps flying. It doesn’t need GPS. It knows how to avoid storms and go in the right direction to cover miles and miles.

Before it even takes off, it shrinks some of its organs and makes its heart, lungs, and pectoral muscles larger—and increases its red blood cell count—so that it’s primed for flying.

How does it know where to go? How does it know what to do? How does it fly so far without stopping to eat or rest?

The answer is clear. Only God. God created the birds. God gives these magnificent creatures what they need to do the seemingly impossible, flying while half-sleeping, covering immense distances that humans would need superpowered technology to navigate. God guides the godwits on their journeys, making sure they have the oxygen and the strength and the drive and the instincts to go where they need to go.

If God does that for these marvelous birds, then of course He does the same for each of us.

He gives us what we need—whether that means home tests or friends to help us find humor in the craziness.

He guides us to make less-bad decisions in a time when there seem to be few good ones.

He offers us the strength we didn’t know we needed for a journey that is longer than we realized when we started on it almost two years ago.

God knows the journey is too long and that we might need super-human powers along the way. But He is with us every step of the way. And He will be again tomorrow.

Photo by Karney Lee, USFWS on Pixnio

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