Summer is loosening its grip on things. It’s still hot down here in southern Missouri—over 90 degrees today—but you can tell that the air is different. The humidity has drained away, leaving a still-warm breath that crackles now instead of steaming. It’s our first sign that things are shifting.
I took my usual morning walk this morning through the neighborhood, noting the new appearance of leaves on the sidewalk and that piercing shade of autumn blue that hurts your eyes sometimes. I see the same neighbors out walking most mornings. We wave, we comment on the weather, we move along. The pedestrian paths we take each day have become rhythms of normalcy, anchoring points of willful human behavior in a world that has kept us from our usual patterns.
I stopped by a coffee shop this morning and was surprised to see that half the stacks of tables had been dispersed in rows spaced six feet apart. I sat down while I waited for my coffee, surprised by this little bit of progress. We can sit to drink our coffee now. Slip our masks down to our chins and take a sip.
Our local viral case load has finally taken a dip after weeks of increasing numbers. My kids have been at school for three weeks. We’ve resumed church services to half-capacity. I sat down in a coffee shop today. I feel like we’re taking a breath—a deep, mask-muffling breath, and pausing for a moment. Because the truth is, we don’t know if there will be a resurgence. So, we pause. And we give thanks for the little bits of progress, the small appearances of normal life, the turn in the air.
During the past six months, I’ve thought a lot about the gifts of quarantine. Some from that honeymoon “we’re in this together!” stage, some from the days I wanted to be anywhere but here. Early on we were heroic and brave-faced. We could do this. We might even enjoy it. And to some extent, we did. My family ate every single meal together around our dining room table. We watched more movies than I could count, read books aloud, played board games that my dad bought and shipped to us with regularity. We played outside, took bike rides, went for long walks. We slept in. We rested. We watched the end of winter blossom into spring. We watched summer swallow it all up with relentless heat.
And somewhere in there, it stopped being fun or restful. I grew fretful, snippy, short-tempered, stir-crazy. I was tired of the sameness that colored every day with the same dull shade of the previous day. The longer I was at home with the same day on repeat, the more I saw the sins humming just below the surface of a more sanctified-appearing attitude. Anger, selfishness, irritability, discontent. They were always there. I’ve long known that. But like any sandpapery experience in life, quarantine rubbed them bare. I couldn’t hide my sin so well, nor could I medicate it with all the usual busyness of normal life. No breather at the coffee shop with friends to stifle the irritability of parenting 24/7. No trips to the store to browse when I’m feeling discontent. No vacations for a change of scenery when I’m bored. No, there was just life as it was for us all. It was a lot of the same. And there were a lot of head-on collisions with my sin.
Those collisions didn’t feel like gifts. They felt like things to be escaped, really. And if I could have escaped, I would have. But there were no exits. Instead, the sun rose in the mornings and so did I. I opened my Bible, I confessed the ugliness in my heart, I turned my gaze to Jesus, and He chipped away at every little gritty, sinful tendency in my heart. It was hard. It seems like every day He went to work on those little irritations. Turns out they weren’t so little. And they weren’t just irritations.
Each morning when I walk my neighborhood, I pass a Victorian monstrosity that’s well over a hundred years old. It has borne the dilapidated weight of every single year. Surely it was an incredible house in its heyday. It has a turret, for crying out loud. But it fell into disrepair somewhere along the way and stayed that way for a long time. A few years ago, a man purchased the house and began the pain-staking process of restoring it. I can’t imagine what the square footage of this house must be—it’s massive, rambling with additions, topping out with three (maybe four?) stories, and covered in original wood siding with peeling white paint. The owner has been doing all the restoration himself, section by section. It has taken years to get about halfway around the house. I walked by the other day and watched him chip away at hundred-year-old paint from the side of the turret. He stood hunched over in the cherry-picker that had him hoisted fifty feet off the ground. With a paint scraper in hand—a simple handheld tool—he chipped and flaked at the peeling paint. I didn’t think the house could look worse, but in that moment, it absolutely did. Beneath the white paint was a dull, aged brown. Some of the wood had rotted.
“He’s going to work on that house until the day he dies,” I thought as I looped around the back of the house to resume my walk. So much work done, and so much more to go. But one day, it will be done. And you can see from the bones of the house just how beautiful it will be. It won’t be an eyesore; it will be a masterpiece.
It won’t become a masterpiece, however, without the owner painstakingly chipping away the peeling paint and repairing the rotted wood.
Perhaps today isn’t a pause; maybe it’s the beginning of the next phase. The gifts of quarantine have indeed been hundreds of hours with my husband and children alone—playing games, reading books, watching movies together, memorizing verses together, praying every night. But the gifts of quarantine have also been the daily, sanctifying work the Lord has been doing in my heart. Exposing the dull, rotted attitudes and proclivities to selfishness, He’s brought my sin to the surface. And He’s making me new.
Maybe we’ll go backwards again. Maybe this is just a pause. Maybe the coming of fall will be swept into another winter of pandemic. The Lord knows. And He’ll finish what He has started.
Photo by Joshua Gresham on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.