Connect in significant ways.

The coronavirus crisis you are experiencing is extensive and extended, but difficult as it may be, try to understand how life, human life, will be changed in a good way coming out the other side of this pandemic. You learn through your difficulties, you grow through adversity, and whatever happens that creates anxiety, pain, and suffering is a learning experience.

This experience is in its way a means of responding. The learning that takes place is in finding affirmation, love, and compassion. You see this occur on a much smaller scale when there is a storm that creates considerable damage in a community, and it is in such circumstances that neighbors who don’t know one another are brought together and find grounds to be compassionate, loving, and supporting.

It is exactly this way with this viral crisis. Despite the fact that you must be isolated, it is precisely because of that isolation that there is strong motivation to connect with one another in even more significant ways. Speaking with neighbors, friends, family, and loved ones takes on a far deeper impact and becomes the source of enormous strength. It is a time to show you care, that you are concerned for others, and that you are reaching out to provide prayerful support. You are supported by God as you reach beyond yourself and exercise the expression of nonjudgmental love.

This crisis is not about the self. It is not about the I. It is about the we. It is about identifying the greater community, the community of humankind independent of borders, the geographic, philosophic, and political borders that so often run the day and feel to be fully normal.