My mind keeps returning to Frogger, the video game from the early 1980’s.

Isn’t that a good picture of what life is like right now? Under normal circumstances, life is complicated. But with COVID and elections and etc. etc. it’s just crazy. Jump forward. Again. Again, again … no, jump back! Wait …

I’m trying to plan fundraising activity for this month and then for 2021, and I can’t get much planning done. Certainty is always provisional at best; we never know what is going to happen. But it’s even harder to plan in the pandemic era. “Can I go to Kansas in March? Will the USA even be open to travelers from Europe? Can Beth come back to Zagreb with me? Etc., etc.”

We have had a trip to the USA and back on our books since May or so. The airlines have cancelled our chosen flights for these trips at least a half-dozen times since I booked them.

See? It’s Frogger. One jump forward, one more, WATCH OUT, there’s a truck, jump back.

So I wait. I try to inhabit Rich Mullins’s lyric:

Oh Lord please give me the strength
To watch and work and love and sing and pray

Watch (& wait). Work and love (“Do not grow weary of doing good.”). Sing. Pray. Expect that God is going to act, we just don’t know when. Like the faithful virgins in Matthew 25, we don’t know when, we just have to be ready.

And when there’s an opening, jump forward twice. But watch out for trucks, and snapping turtles.

T.S. Eliot wrote:

Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to sit still,
Even among these rocks, our peace in his will.