Janet suggested a walk together to the excellent Swallows Wood. This is further than usual for lockdown, at about 4 miles round trip, so we were hoping that early morning on a wet Friday would be relatively free of people. And so it proved. An excellent walk, and the paths aren’t too muddy yet. We experimented with a web page I’m working on, which should enable people to input prayers attached to places, for anyone to look at if they go the same way. The internet is wonderful in many ways, but there’s lots of things I don’t understand about how to use it.
Sunday’s Psalm is 23. I can get worn out by its familiarity, and it reminds me of funerals (unsurprising, that). It might be worth giving it a poke, though. For instance, verse 4, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff– they comfort me.” The promise is not that God will excuse a person from the valley of the shadow of death, but that God will be there in the valley alongside the person, to offer comfort.
It’s been good to play Scrabble with relatives online, but I get confused by the app. It’s got all these brightly coloured buttons which I might press by accident, and a few times I’ve ended up on a full page ad with no obvious means of escape, except by closing the app. Also, in common with some others it covers up the top and bottom bars, so you have to drag a bit to find them again. I wish for more simple times.
The news is worrying on many fronts. It’s not just Michigan where the far right and libertarians are flexing their muscles. Money or life? It should be a no-brainer, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. That’s a balance we make as a society all the time, deciding how fast we should drive, how hard to come down on unsafe working practices, how much we can afford to spend on cancer treatments of marginal benefit, and so on. And where ‘life’ is in the equation is not obvious. Lockdown kills as well, through suicide and domestic violence, and above all through poverty. I fear this virus might be another ratchet thing – maybe it’s just me, but it seems that in every economic disturbance, the rich manage OK, and the poor get poorer. Anyway, FWIW in almost every actual case I’d lean more towards the ‘life’ side of the balance than most. The main exception might be some cancer treatments. There’s a selection bias in the media – we don’t hear of the times it didn’t work out. (Although I’m sure if I had cancer I’d see things differently!) I don’t know, but I have a suspicion that in some cases the money might be better spent dealing with poverty – or even in preparing properly for a pandemic: God save us from optimists!
God bless every child of this planet,
in sickness and in health,
in wealth and in poverty,
in happiness and in grief,
but especially in sickness, poverty and grief.