Other people are the danger

Day 83 of coronavirus in France

Day 32 of enforced confinement

It’s been a month. Remember when three days in it already felt like it had been a month?

The WHO has published a children’s book looking at the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of a child. Each parent is a hero because they are doctors healing people or researchers fighting the virus. Each kid also becomes a hero because they discover their superpowers : and the kids super powers can point to eternal truth

  • – keeping people safe (love/care)
  • – breathing deeply to calm your heart (peace)
  • – remembering your safe place (true identity in Christ)

Our role is to flesh out the scenes and discuss them with our children in the context of their corresponding Biblical passages to take it one step further. These are life lessons that will form a foundation for the rest of their lives.

 click to choose your language and download a free PDF copy of the book here

It’s official. Mail is not crossing international borders. You’ve been waiting for birthday and Easter cards and packages to arrive for a month now. The border between the US and France is closed. (source) Post offices are running on only half of their staff and are prioritizing letters that promote social connection. Staff are still making visits to elderly people just to check up on them you can sign up for this service here.

Amazon has been asked to cease operation – or at least that’s how they make it sound. Apparently, they were not taking enough precautions to protect their staff, now considered a health code violation and will be required to follow the strictest protocol like everyone else.

Other people are the danger.

Will the French greeting disappear? Is it time? (source) A cultural shift is happening in our psyche.

As we are training ourselves to hold off the spread of this contagion, we are ingraining something new in our hearts. Certainly, during medieval pestilence, the public had less knowledge of transmission. The protocol that was imposed was often useless or counterproductive. Today we understand all too well the lifespan and transference of a microbe. How will we ever embrace someone without replaying those images?

The good news is that mentally we can disassociate the person from the contagion, but the bad news is that physical touch is still menacing.

Our kids will grow up more conscious than us. Maybe our previous selves would have judged them obsessive, but our future selves will excuse them because we know what they have been through.

Viruses mutate and return. Some return every year. It is referred to as the novel coronavirus because this is not the first time a version has come around. Thankfully they have not all been this virulent. Should we expect some version of this to come around more frequently? If eradicate this virus there will always be another good excuse to be

Other people are the danger. You can’t unlearn new knowledge. How long can we maintain physical distancing and still be able to go back to meaningful interactions that we all crave?

unsplash-logoMitchel Lensink

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.