I’m going to need to recover from this past year of pandemic life. Sure, I learned to appreciate long walks, outings to the park, and eating more meals at home. I even cleaned out some closets and learned to play a little bit of jazz piano last spring. But I’ve also learned I have an unhealthy need for control and a painfully short fuse. I don’t like how the disappointments and changes thrown at us this past year have made me more impatient, serious, and demanding of the people I love most. And I’m ashamed that when I go to pray about it, my nerves are shot and my prayers feel shallow, dry, and distracted.
I opened an email in my inbox this morning from Starbucks with this subject line: Anytime mood lifters. The marketing people at places like Starbucks know what the world needs right now, and it’s definitely a mood lift. Many counselors say their schedules are full because they’ve taken on so many new patients in recent months. Depression, anxiety, and sleep issues are rampant. Prescription medication, supplement sales, and alcohol sales are soaring. And everyday we notice new ways that our children and especially our teens are reeling.
The good news is that spring is just around the corner and hope is on the horizon. We are surely past the peak of this pandemic. But a year of disrupted routines, social disconnection, losses, and fears has taken a toll on all of us in one way or another. What does it look like to go forward well from here? What can we do to begin recovering and recalibrating our bodies and brains?
There are no pat answers to these sorts of questions. I think we’ll need to be proactive and creative about our individual and collective recovery. We’ll need heavy doses of nature and the arts. We’ll need counselors and teachers and pastors to help us fully re-emerge and reconnect with our communities. Some of us—my family included—may need to make major changes and restructure our priorities and our plans. It will take work for us to come out healthy and strong on the other side of this mess.
But I wonder as we look to spring and the hope of more normal days if there is some way to start healing our hearts now?
I think where God is concerned, the answer is always yes.
One of the reasons I love the Psalms is that so many of them were written by David. And he was just a disaster at times. His screwups were major and many—adultery and murder included. He was well-aquatinted with his own depravity. But his pursuit of God and His grace were relentless. He knew when he was at his very lowest, the only way out of the pit was to keep looking up and crying out for help. I’ve always appreciated the honesty of his prayer in Psalm 51:
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a right spirit within me.
I relate now more than ever to needing a heart cleanse and a reset of my spirit. Eugene Peterson words it this way in The Message:
God, make a fresh start in me,
shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.
Don’t throw me out with the trash,
or fail to breathe holiness in me.
Bring me back from gray exile,
put a fresh wind in my sails!
Psalm 51:10-12
This prayer feels like a good starting place for recovering from nearly twelve months of “gray exile.” What a long, lonely, strange year.
We need to be brought back to center. We need deep breaths of His holiness breathed into our weary lungs. And how we all need fresh wind in our sails!
So this is my prayer for these days when I don’t have the words or the will to form my own prayers: Bring us back, Lord. Breathe your life in us. Put a fresh wind in our sails!
Let’s hope and pray and watch him do it.
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