It’s so easy to be grateful when life is chugging along smoothly, less so when even the lemons you’re squeezing to make lemonade seem to be bitter and moldy.
I know. My brick house of gratitude is mortared with tears and I’m sorrys. “I’m sorry, your husband has cancer”. “I’m sorry, he didn’t make it”. “I’m sorry, we can’t find the baby’s heartbeat”. “I’m sorry your mom collapsed and died in therapy”. I know pain and loss intimately and still, I can write, with confidence, that everything is going to be alright. In addition to a deep and abiding faith that grounds me in the belief that there’s an ultimate OK coming, I have lived through losses and tragedies that should have stripped me of my sunny disposition long ago. I have trudged through bad weeks and months and sometimes years at a time but I’ve come out on the other end. While being dragged, kicking and screaming, up the steep hill of personal growth, I learned the two things that I wouldn’t trade for an easier path; resilience and gratitude. I learned to cling, sometimes desperately, to the belief that by simply putting one foot in front of the other I would arrive somewhere better. I learned to remind myself of even the smallest things to be thankful for. Those reminders kept a glimmer of hope burning. That glimmer of hope was fanned by doggedness and molded by alternating fits and starts of steps forward and leaps back. My “everything will be alright” is not the platitude of a charmed soul, proverbial spoiled rich girl or even someone who is unfailingly optimistic, although I do tend to find the upside. The fact is, once you pull yourself up a few times with “Nobody Here But Jesus” playing over and over as your soundtrack, you find out that you can pull it together and that life will not beat you, it’ll just teach you more than you’d ever planned on learning.
So while you’re reading this, in whatever state of mind you find yourself as we go through this unique, difficult Covid-19 adventure, I would like to remind you that everything will be alright. There will be loss, in some cases, unimaginable tragedy. But there will be rebuilding, recovery and somehow, a new and different alright-ness. In the mean time, hunker down, wash your hands, watch some Tiktok videos and help someone if you can.
My help this week comes from Action For Healthy Kids. Many thanks to the bloggers for collecting such a comprehensive list of resources for everything from online learning to fitness and immune boosting nutrition.