Our Saviors Lutheran Church - Ellsworth, WI

​            This has been a pretty insane week. We started, last Sunday, with Daylight Savings Time, which threw us all off of our sleep patterns. Then, as we needed the week to recover from losing an hour, it turns out there was a full moon, which does no favors for anyone who works in the medical field or with children. And as if that wasn’t enough to ratchet up the crazy, this past Friday was the thirteenth. It’s a week that seems to have been designed for the full brunt of the coronavirus arriving in our area and all that that means.
            With it, so many of us are experiencing significant changes to how we organize our lives. Jobs that can be done remotely are mostly opting to have people work from home. The normal routine of meeting up with colleagues during the day is disrupted. Schools are canceled for the next several weeks, forcing parents to figure out childcare. Colleges are going to remote learning for the rest of the semester. And then we make the difficult decision not to meet in person for worship today. If you didn’t have anxiety already, this week certainly hasn’t helped.

​            When we were growing up, my parents bought a brand-new Apple computer. It was a big blocky thing, with that hard plastic that always makes me think of early 90’s computers, the monitor a big cube, and really, really tall keys on the keyboard that clacked when you typed. My mom did a lot of work on the computer—she was just starting to take my grandmother’s genealogy work under her wing, so she was typing up all my grandma’s handwritten notes.
            Somewhere along the way, my mom got really good at typing. Like, between her and my brother, they are really, really fast typists. But with this early-90’s Apple computer, the processing speed…well, it wasn’t quite up to snuff. So my mom found it very entertaining to rapidly type out sentence after sentence, then stop and watch as the cursor raced across the screen, catching up to her already-typed letters.
            We live in an age of fast things. We get our food fast—I remember the big flashing clock making sure our drive-thru time stayed under three minutes a car when I worked at Hardee’s. We get all kinds of services done in the click of a button—everything from bank transfers to whole mortgage applications can be done in an instant. We even expect our deliveries to be completed in two business days thanks to Amazon. And, in a way, I think we’ve come to expect that everything will more or less catch up to this instantaneous fulfillment.