As the old joke goes, the two happiest days in a boat-owner’s life are the day they buy a boat and the day they sell it!  I bought my one and only boat back in 1998.  It was an 18-foot, center console bay boat.  At first, I loved it.  Then, as time went by, I used it less and less.  A couple of years into it, I was diagnosed with cancer.  When I returned, boating was definitely not one of the hobbies that I picked up again.  Although I did not own the boat that long, there were a couple of basics that I learned and have never forgotten.  For example, when riding along in your boat on a lake, you need to gradually slow down and stop, otherwise, the wake will come crashing in to the back.  That’s a pretty good analogy for more than one aspect of life, and I have been thinking about it a lot lately.  In fact, I think it describes pretty well what a lot of us are experiencing in what you might call a post-COVID world.

In pretty much every area of my life and ministry, I have encountered unique and, in some cases, new challenges and difficulties.  I’m not the only person who has experienced this.  One of our coworkers recently said to me, “it’s just a whole new kind of people out there now.”  It’s not everywhere, but it’s real.  People overreact to the simplest of things.  Some people elevate an issue to a 10 when, on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s actually just a 2 or 3.  Some parents act like they don’t want to hold their children accountable. And, worst of all, in my opinion, there seems to be a collective fatigue pretty much everywhere you look.  I’m not blaming this on anyone or anything.  It’s just that, if we want to move forward and regain some sense of direction and peace, we need to be aware of the overall climate.  The pandemic may be something through which we have moved, but its wake is now catching up to the back of our boat.  I know that, in my own personal life, I have to often step back and ask myself, “why am I feeling the way I’m feeling right now?”  I have to work, through prayer, reflection and healthy conversation, to maintain the sense of perspective that God needs me to keep.  The only way that can happen is for me, for us to stop, breathe, and allow God in even more.

The other thing that I’ve noticed lately, and it’s in the church and in society overall, is that some people seem to be embracing a fear-mongering approach.  Blaming the condition of society on the devil, warning us that we all need to change our ways or we’re going to be condemned to eternal punishment, and so on is more than an unhealthy approach.  It’s wrong.  It’s not “of God,” as the expression goes.  We need to be aware of this, both for ourselves and for our children.  God is not a vengeful God, nor does the Lord call us to spew fire and brimstone.  God is about love.  Period.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when we need to be challenged.  Those times do come around every now and then.  We are, in the end, to be about love, compassion, and forgiveness.  How many times did our seminary rector at the time, now Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans, say to us, “if we’re going to err with each other, we must err on the side of compassion.”  Also, in a world that makes thousands of sources of information available to us, we must, we absolutely MUST BE AWARE that many of those sources are mistaken, guilty of spreading opinion and misinformation, and potentially damaging to the innocent person who seeks good counsel.  Our basic truths are found in scripture and in the truths passed onto us in and through the wisdom of our Church.  Unfortunately, there are those ministers of various faiths who allow personal preference and opinion to dominate the discussion.  We need to be cautious regarding to whom we listen.

Why did I write this particular blog?  Simply put, we’re not out of the COVID woods yet.  There are many more deep breaths to be taken.  The most important type of deep breath is what I call the spiritual deep breath, time with God, in quiet, in prayer.  Taking that time is the same as slowly throttling down your boat motor.  If we don’t do it, then eventually the wake will come crashing in on us.