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Sabbath Devotional :: Navigating the Now — and Planning for the After
Has anyone figured this out yet? How to make Now work? We all knew what to do in the Before. Even if there were lots of days when I didn’t like Before, I understood it. I could walk its well-worn paths without needing to pay much attention to the obstacles, vistas, or valleys. But Before is gone, and given how solid and permanent it seemed at the time, it went away surprisingly quickly! So I am figuring out Now along with the rest of you, and while we need to understand Now and make it work, it is still both weird and temporary, because though it feels interminable it isn’t.…
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Are You Aware? On the Street — Greater Love Hath No Man
This is part III in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. Are you an essential worker? I am. Every day I go out into the world to help you, my friends, to be able to remain safe. I am not a nurse like Kious Kelly, a 48-year-old assistant nurse manager at Mount Sinai West. This is the hospital in NYC where nurses wore trashbags because they did not have access to the recommended personal protective equipment (PPE). Kious Kelly died of COVID-19. I am not a doctor like Frank Gabrin who had texted a friend to report the lack of PPE in the emergency…
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Healthcare Education :: PPE and Ventilators
As we’ve seen over the past weeks, we are all interconnected in the fight to slow the spread of COVID-19 and save lives. Social distancing was our first crucial step. As we continue to maintain social distancing protocols, if we do it right, we can “flatten the curve” of infection. This buys us precious time to ramp up our efforts on the second vital step: increasing the capacity of our hospital systems. As exponentially more people get sick, emergency rooms and hospitals will need far greater numbers of personnel and equipment. Frontline responders in hospitals across the country are already reporting shortages of essential equipment. This is taking place on a systems level,…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Love in the Time of Coronavirus
A few nights ago, as we were falling asleep, my husband said to me, “I’m getting pretty tired of living in interesting times.” I feel the same way. The past three years have felt surreal, and the past week or two especially. I feel like I hardly recognize my world from day to day. As we read the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson this week, I was struck with Jacob’s fixation on and concern for his people. I was especially moved by the last verse of the reading. As he transitions into his analogy of the olive vineyard, he says this: “Behold, my beloved brethren, I will unfold…
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Awareness Wednesday :: Xenophobia, Part II — Symptom of a Virus
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. — Chinese Proverb In the closing months of 2019, a novel coronavirus jumped from animals to humans and began spinning a web of infection, starting with the people of China and spreading with staggering speed worldwide. The virus, and its potentially deadly symptoms, are not the only thing being disseminated on a global scale. Xenophobia, particularly toward those of Asian descent, has seen a dramatic rise in the ensuing months, both here in the United States and around the world. A young woman from Brooklyn reported that while visiting Washington D.C., a man started making faces at her on the metro. She…
