NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

  ‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.’   -Hebrews 11:8  Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, says this, too, will pass . Dr. Eileen de Villa, Medical Official of Health for Toronto, says this, too, will pass . Justin Trudeau , Prime Minister of Canada, says this, too, will pass . But will it really??? Some days this feels like an unending struggle with just one tiny step forward and not just two, but more like a dozen steps back.  Of course I’m talking about COVID-19 with all its associated variants. We might even be forgiven for rewriting that well known quote from Ecclesiastes to read…. For everything there is a season,…but  just not for this ! Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest,  might well have been talking about COVID   when he penned the lines below: We should like to skip  The intermediate stages. We are impatient

As Epiphany came and went this year I found myself thinking about the story of the magi and the gifts that they brought to the baby Jesus, gifts of gold, frankincense,  and myrrh. These gifts were harbingers of who Jesus was: gold was a symbol of kingship, frankincense (an incense) a symbol of a deity, and myrrh (an embalming oil) a symbol of death.  Then I began to wonder what gifts the last two years under COVID-19 had brought with it. And there have been many gifts - most of them disrupting our lives and our livelihoods. But not all! And we are still learning from them.  There is the gift of patience which as the saying goes is seldom found in women and never in a man. If we have learned nothing else from COVID it is that we need to have patience, that as the top doctors say it will end one day and until that time all we can do is to have patience. A second gift we have received is a new appreciation of the importance of friends . ZOOM  chats, phone calls, emails and texting h