How? It's too involved and convoluted to explain everything. Let's just say that it isn't so much that we did better than previous years as much as the laundry list of hits we took over the last half dozen years sort of dried up. Not that we were without problems. We had them. We had the usual life events, a flooded basement here, a busted appliance there, dealing with Sears over here. We had some ailments. We had the ups and downs of life. And we had 2020.
But I noticed something. We suffered from Covid era issues like anyone else. We had plans that were dashed. This was supposed to be our youngest son's 'big year.' Traditionally, it was when the boys were eleven that they were able to do all the fun stuff, like go with Dad to an OSU football game. He had looked forward to this year since more than a year ago. And poof! Nothing. It's the same across the board. Just like it is for everyone.
We had things we wanted that were taken. We had goals completely derailed. The boys had to scramble to figure out college in this new environment. We worried about the health of loved ones, especially my Mom who lives with us. And we hoped and prayed that the virus would go away without harming any more than possible.
But we were in it with everyone. Everyone was on the same page. Not just in America, but the world. There were billions waking up to the same thing as we were. As bad as it was, it was a shared experience. And there is a difference between that, and struggling and floundering when everyone else is on a different trajectory.
You see, for the previous years it wasn't shared. Like him or not, Trump presided over quite a robust recovery, one that was easy to see in sold houses and new cars on the road. Easy to hear in the uptick in teachers talking about going to Disney World again, or which cruise their families will take. Easy to see in just the fact that the 'new normal' of monthly Islamic terror attacks suddenly dried up.
But while so many were reaping the benefits of this, our family was dodging one thing after another. It was like that scene at the end of The Empire Strike Back when Vader uses some telekinesis ability to hurtle one piece of machinery after another at Luke until Luke, battered and beaten, is knocked out of a window and into a vast pit. That was us.
For year after year we were hit, and hit, and hit. While we watched so many others begin to recoup and climb out of the post-08 pit and get going again in life, we seemed forever stuck back, clinging to the edges and barely able to hold on.
Through blessings from Church, fellow Christians, friends and wonderful folks on the Internet I've met, we were given just the plank needed to keep dry for another month. But it was always a temp affair, until the next punch came. And sometimes they were big punches. Sometimes death was tugging at someone's shoulders in our home, or auto accidents, or life changing health crises, or year ending injuries, or major damage to our home, or, well, you get the point.
In fact, in a very bad theological manner, that was one thing that began pushing us away from the Orthodox Church and back into Catholic arms. The whole string of 'bad' began the year we met the local Orthodox priest. It kicked into full steam by the time we all moved over and became part of the Orthodox church down the road. And it kept going. Week after week it seemed something happened to keep some, most or even all of us from attending the Divine Liturgy.
Soon we began having a hard time connecting with the church at all. There were problems with Orthodoxy to be sure, and I felt had we been able to get rooted in the tradition, we might have been able to overcome them. But it just seemed as though it wasn't meant to be. Month after month, sometimes week after week, we were hit with something that hamstrung us and sent us back to square one - if we were lucky.
As I've written before, we lost much of what we had when we became Catholic. We entered in the early 00s, and by then it was no longer Scott Hahn's conversion story. For reasons nobody knows, our former bishop acted as if he would rather see the Church sink into the 8th Circle of Hell than see a former Protestant clergy even clean toilets in the diocese. Because of that, when the big crash of 2008 hit, we were pretty much swinging in the breeze. It was by God's grace acting through those around us that we avoided homelessness and starvation.
But it's forever been running on one near-tripping foot ever since. You know, how you step forward and get off balance and just can't get yourself going without stumbling. Or you start a video game and you know from the beginning that you're shafted and you might as well reload and start from scratch. Same here. We were one step from going over the cliff for the next decade, setting us up for the five year journey into hell that we went through until - guess when - 2020!
Again, we didn't have any massive boon, but we received many blessings from family, Christians on the Internet and our local churches - including our old stomping grounds at the local Catholic church (complete with new gift from God priest from Nigeria). And yes, from the State. We were actually able to take a breath and take a step forward. Money from my son's accident (which wasn't his fault) actually gave us a boost, though much of it went to pay off massive medical bills from him and others the previous couple years. See, we have medical insurance and that means massive out of pocket expenses. My Mom seemed to be improving, or at least stabilizing. And by February, we were starting to whisper about taking an actual vacation this year.
Then Covid hit. Much of it, however, hit us like everyone else. But here's the thing. Many of the things people have been hit with, many things they've struggled with, many things they've had to sacrifice due to Covid are where we have been for years. As my boys said, it's not that we are better off, but we were ahead of the curve. We've already been stripped down to bare bones living and facing the loss of many things on a yearly or even monthly basis. We already homeschooled and my sons have been living at home while going to college to avoid debt.
So when the Covid hit, and the measures to fight it threw everyone upside down, we were already there, so to speak. We were already where others had been thrown into. As others struggled to get their heads around not eating out or having to watch the kids every day or watching important goals wrecked, we had been there for years. As we heard people lament their lost plans or upside down existence, we sympathized because that's where we've been for at least a half dozen years.
Our prayer, therefore, is that people catch up with us. We certainly did our best Thoreau and simplified over the years, by necessity. But in so doing, when 2020 hit, we were actually prepared. Financially we have been on the limb, but that's nothing new. Many of the other things, however, were simply par for the course in our lives, and therefore we've gone through 2020 more or less unscathed. I hesitate to say it's the best year we've had for some time. But I'll say it's not been bad, and in many ways, the previous years are what we have to thank for having prepared us for what caught so many others by surprise.
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