How long has the pandemic lasted? Longer than 525,600 minutes. Longer than two Easter celebrations; two graduation seasons. It has been so long now, that I find myself regularly forgetting about what life was like in the Before Times. So long that it is hard to tell how much we have changed, how much we have been affected.

How long has the pandemic lasted? Long enough that my six year old’s mouth had become a disaster by the time I finally ventured out and took her to the dentist. Something I would likely have put off even longer if she hadn’t complained of a toothache. Long enough that she needed oral surgery to repair the damage from months without intervention.

How long has the pandemic lasted? How have you been affected? How have the children in your life?

I felt a ton of shame sitting next to the very nice dentist, as he explained to me things I already knew. Shame that I had let things get this bad. Even though I knew there was no reason for shame. That we had moved, switched insurance, wanted to wait for positivity rates to go down. But still, I had somehow hoped that I could limit the ways my kids were affected. Knew they wouldn’t make it through unscathed, but maybe thought we could avoid not one, not two, but three silver crowns…

As we celebrated All Saints Day on Sunday, as I watched so many of you move up the aisle to light candles and record names of those beloved who have died, as I read those names and rang the bell, I was moved by how much we have all lost this year. How much we have all had to carry. How much we have all been marked and changed by this time.

We are coming back together. We have in person seminars and this week start two services and we have Church on the Prairie and Lessons and Carols. But our stewardship campaign is moving more slowly than we’d like. We don’t feel as connected as we’d hoped. There are some of you we haven’t seen, for complex reasons. Our lives have been moving on, and not in the ways they used to, for us as individuals, or as a community.

There’s no shame in it. But it’s hard.

A friend told me, when I confessed my dental shame, that “teeth are an evolutionary failure.” She was sort of joking, but I appreciated the idea that not all of this was my fault. That the things just wear out by doing what they’re supposed to do.

This life is hard, and over the past months, it’s been even harder than usual. But as we heard Art and Alan sing on Sunday, “this love, this love, between you and I, is older than that burning ball of fire up in sky.” I am grateful for every time you show up — virtually or in-person. I am grateful for the ways you support and care for one another. So grateful for the ways you believe in and support this community, in the work we are doing, in the life we are creating together, even now. We are bound together by love and hope, even in the midst of despair, even in the midst of pediatric dental woes. Blessed be.

Bromleigh