Last night I read about the first NYC MTA worker to die of COVID-19. He was 49 years old and a longtime conductor in the NYC subway. This started to make the dire situation of the residents of New York City, one of my favorite places, more real to me.
I type this while sitting in a small, comfortable office in our church building, less than a mile from my house. I live in a small town with no known cases of the disease and in a county that has plenty of elbow room, and only a few people who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
I have a job in an essential part of an essential industry.
We’re even in the middle of a fairly major renovation to our house which is proceeding just fine despite the global catastrophe.
Other than some faint anxiety of whether or not our local stores will be able to supply us with some of the essentials, my only real impacts are the extra pressures on my wife due to suddenly becoming a homeschool mom and our inability to gather with our church family.
Then I read of the tent cities sprouting up around hospitals. Of refrigerator trailers being parked outside hospitals to deal with the need for more morgue space. Of another MTA worker dying, this one a 61 year old bus driver. Of doctors trying to figure out how to share ventilators from their woefully inadequate supply, and possibly use them for multiple patients at the same time.
And I think of the scores of hours I’ve spent in the NYC subway, and the people who I literally rubbed shoulders with, and all the MTA staff who did their nearly invisible part in my moving around the city, and what that city and those people are experiencing today.
My chest starts to constrict, but not from the virus decimating the lungs and lives of so many.
This virus doesn’t scare me.
No, I wouldn’t enjoying dying, and I have no real interest in experiencing the grip of its resulting disease as an out-of-shape adult who used to be an asthmatic kid, but I don’t fear it.
Not in that way.
But I have a sense of dread for those passing from life, through death, to eternity. For those suffering, unable to draw their own breath, the very essence they need to exist. For that little world put together with concrete, steel, and glass, but held together by the people, those millions of living souls. Caught right now in the grips of a sometimes life ending, but always life changing crisis.
How far will the ripples go?
As businesses crash, jobs are lost, and the ability of many to pay for food and shelter dwindles, what next?
Yes, we pray, and we ask the God of all comfort to show Himself strong.
But how are you going to be salt, flavoring and preserving in the lives of those around you? How are you going to be light, and drive the darkness away? Will you be there to cloth the naked, visit the sick, and give the thirsty a drink, like those Jesus commends in Matthew 25, or will you be like those condemned by James who say “Be warm and full,” while doing nothing of substance?
We have an opportunity. We serve a God of redemption, who loves to take the rubble of a broken world and turn it back to beauty. How will you be His partner, His instrument in that?
