The Prison

My granddaughter Bea (5 years old in 2020), gave me a hand-crafted card with a drawn gridwork on the front. It is her depiction of the “prison” that we are in while under what she understands as house arrest during the global pandemic of Covid 19.   

Bea is an extrovert.  Being kept away from the larger community and from group gatherings, that give her energy and add meaning to her life, is like being in prison in isolation.   This is a very real form of torture and suffering for her. 

Her parents are doing their best to fill her days.  She “talks” on Messenger video with family and friends, she keeps busy doing school work, she makes cards for the neighbours and delivers them to their mailboxes…but it isn’t quite enough for her.   She is a bit of an actress and requires an audience.   This isn’t just a want or a benign longing, it is an intrinsic need.   

One way my son, her father, has worked through this is to brave the weather and the lines at department stores.  I suppose some backtracking on this story is needed here.  

“On 30 January 2020, COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (by the World Health Organization [WHO]) with an official death toll (from the disease) of 171. (A few weeks later, on March 11, 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic.) By 31 December 2020, this figure stood at 1,813, 188 … since then, the total number of global deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is at least 3 million.”  

Source:  https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality

The resulting action was a shutdown of society as we knew it. Gatherings were forbidden, restaurants closed except for take-out orders, online grocery shopping became a means of obtaining supplies, families became isolated in their homes, and schools moved to online classrooms, as did church services. Concerts, sporting events, and other large group gatherings were halted.  Personally shopping for supplies meant waiting in long lines since store patron capacities were capped.  Sanitizing stations, masks and lineups for everything became normal.  This is the societal construct that Bea was facing with great displeasure. 

As I said our son, Grant, understood Bea’s pain.  He knew she needed people. How does one give an audience to a child when gatherings are forbidden or frowned upon?   The solution was those department store lineups.   Grant would go to Walmart. He give Bea a ride on his shoulders, which prevented her from squirming out of his grasp. He would then position themselves 6 feet away from the lineup and travel up and down the line so that Bea could greet people and talk with them.  This made her extremely happy.   It filled her very real needs. 

People responded well to our little socialite’s charm and care.

Romans 16:16: Says, “Greet one another with a holy kiss”.  A holy greeting is a genuine, heartfelt, appropriate, and visible expression of love.  This action of Bea’s and Grant’s was not quite a kiss but it was certainly an exercise of the commands of the “one-anothers” in scripture. In the New Testament, there are over 100 “one-another” commands related to how to - or not to - treat others.  Caring for, building up, loving, showing kindness and compassion, and being encouraging and hospitable are just some of the qualities called for in those passages.   I believe that is exactly what Bea was doing on those trips to the line-ups.  It may have met her own need but it also certainly met the needs of those in line who received as much or more of a boost from those visits as Bea did.