The Pause of a Positive

Last week, I communicated with the parish in an email message that I had tested positive for COVID-19 and that I would remain in Mississippi until this week. To be certain, it was not news that I anticipated sharing with you, and I certainly had not planned to spend a full extra week in Mississippi because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it seemed like the most prudent thing to do given the results of a rapid COVID test coming back as positive. 

The positive test meant that I needed to isolate away from others and monitor my own vital signs. So, on Monday, I went back to my mother’s house while she and my sister went to the compounding pharmacy to get vitamins (C, D3, Zinc, Melatonin, and Nattokinase) as recommended by healthcare professionals for someone who might have COVID-19. I got an oximeter to track my oxygen intake and settled into the idea that I might begin to feel pretty bad as the virus circulated within my body. 

As I awaited for my mother and sister to return with supplies, I busied myself with getting things I needed into a specific section of the house so I could minimize the risk of giving it to my mother. I grabbed several bottles of water, a floor fan, and moved into a bedroom further away from my mom’s part of the house. It was an attempt to keep myself as far from my mom as possible. 

Over the course of Monday, we did our very best to keep as distant from one another as possible. Knowing that the Delta variant is much more contagious than other variants that have come along, I knew that I did not want to be anywhere close to my mom. To have time together we would sit outside spread 20-30 feet apart from each other. After a day of working from home, we would go into the backyard to share what happened during our day of work and watch the dogs run back and forth along the fence line with Hazel doing her job to protect her patch and Hugo doing his best to get Hazel to play with him. 

Then, the PCR test results arrived: negative. The more sensitive COVID-19 test said that there was no coronavirus detected in my system on the day the sample was taken, which happened to be the same day as the test that showed up as positive. I began to seek advice from medical professionals and health departments – the one in Mississippi and the one in Arizona. I called and spoke with my own physician, and I decided that I needed to get another test that could help me know if I had COVID-19 or not. The third test came back on Saturday afternoon: negative. I did not have COVID-19. 

In another age, I think I would have been highly annoyed with the fact that I had rearranged my life for what turned out to be a negative test, The truth, though, is that it also provided me with an additional week around my family. While I spent my days working, I was able to enjoy evenings with my mother, and I was able to be close to home when another member of my family was in the hospital. The additional week waiting to know my COVID status was a week of grace that invited me to slow down and to celebrate time with my family after more than 18 months of not seeing one another.

For the last 20 months or so, our parish has been doing what it could to keep things moving. We have adapted to the curves of the pandemic with new technology, worshipping outside, meeting on Zoom, and making phone calls to one another to check in with folks as we moved through the pandemic. Now, we are inside another surge of this virus and might have to take a few steps backwards from where we were before we are able to move forward again – at least as it relates to wearing masks at church. 

The step backward also invites us to ask questions about the essentials of the ministries of our parish. To that end, we are embarking on a ministry planning exercise on August 21 in which the parish councils will consider the essence of ministry for each council. Once we think about that in relation to the vision for the parish, we will begin to map out the essential ministries within each council. The essential ministries for each council will be the ministries that shape the ministry plan for the parish for one very important reason: we simply don’t have the volunteers to support everything we were doing as a parish. 

Now, we are beginning to ask important questions of our parish. We are asking how to get back to the basics, to pare things down to those essential ministries that define us as a parish, and to focus our efforts on ministry recruitment through those essential ministries. Though we may want to do more, we are likely to discover that there is a grace in doing less. We are able to spend more time on the things we choose to continue doing, and we no longer have to fret over whether we will get the lay ministers we need for this ministry or that ministry. 

I hope that you will join us for the August 21 Ministry Planning Day as we seek to get back to the essence of parish ministry. In a way, we are taking a pause because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just as I was asked to pause most of my normal activities for a week, we are having to pause to consider the essentials of our shared ministry. We are spending a little time on the front porch as we sit together and ask the question of what we need to hang onto because it is so central to being church that without it we would no longer be church and what do we need to let go of because it is not central to being the church in a hurting world. 

In Christ,

Hunter+