Here We Go Again!!!

Yesterday was a delightful day. Then at suppertime I discovered that one of our residents at the retirement community where I live had tested positive for Covid-19. He, of course, will be in quarantine for the next few days and the community will have restrictions also. The moment I heard the news I thought “Here We Go again.” I felt a feeling of frustration and slight despair. How can I go through yet another restricted activity period due to Covid-19? And then I remembered an experience I had in the 1980s.

I was in charge of selling several thousand cookbooks to make money for a charitable organization I belonged to at the time. The cookbooks were stored in a warehouse which unfortunately had some brown recluse spiders in it. I was bitten on my left leg and in about 2 hours I was a very sick person! The dermatologist I went to said he had only a few hours to save my leg!!! Well, he saved my leg but I had a miserable time for two weeks! A few months later I sustained a second brown recluse bite from a spider which also was in the warehouse! The second bite was terrible but better than the first one. A few months later I had a similar experience. (If you are thinking why didn’t we spray to kill the spiders, I assure you we did! The spiders were like Covid-19 -hard to eliminate!) By the time I received the fourth bite, my system had acquired immunity and I had a breeze getting over the bite! I gained confidence from these memories and I knew I had survived the initial Covid experience and I could survive subsequent experiences!

What is the moral to this story? No two experiences are ever the same. Because we have survived one experience helps make us better prepared for the next one. We limit ourselves by not realizing we are growing stronger from our past experiences.

With the Lord as our Guide, we can do all things.

This is not the time to say “I can’t.” It is the time to say, “I can!”