Sweet-smelling Lock-down?

As the bard put it, four-and-a-quarter centuries ago, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." (Romeo & Juliet 2, ii).  I've heard many different terms used to describe these present circumstances: lock-down, quarantine, confinement ... even captivity.  And I suppose there are similarities between the lock-down and imprisonment.  It's a time of restriction, after all; we're restricted as to what we can do, where we can go, who we can see.  We're even allowed out for exercise, although the limits are more generous than simply saying 'hello' to the sun and walking endless circuits of a small courtyard.

So far as I was concerned, one of the earliest differences between lock-down and imprisonment was the need to find my own food.  It was a challenge that commanded an unfair slice of my attention during the first couple of weeks, until an arrangement had been made for a friend to do a weekly shop for me.  It was the first of many examples of carrying out as much as possible of normal life, but in a different way.  Instead of a leisurely stroll, or a tightly-programmed family car-ride to church on a Sunday morning, we can now lounge in our pyjamas in front of the computer screen and perhaps exercise some last-minute choice whose service to 'join in' with today.  If we're late, we can catch up with the whole thing on replay whenever it suits.

Many of us will have had the privilege (?!) of being able to work from home.  This will have taken on many guises, of course.  For some people it could simply mean spending five days a week doing something that had already been the norm on some days anyway.  Others would have found it a new and perhaps challenging experience, with the need to become instantly proficient with hitherto unseen software.  While money, in the sense of financial transaction, has played its usual all-embracing part in our lives, the means of using it will have changed, to the almost complete exclusion of cash as a means of payment.  I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I still have the same physical coins in my purse, and notes in my wallet, that were there on March 23rd.

In these many ways, and more, we are growing used to a new way of living.  And when, one by one, the restrictions are lifted, a further adjustment will have to be made as we return to the former ways.  More likely, we'll find that life in the future will not be precisely as it was pre-Covid but will have taken on yet another 'new normal' form that will, it its own turn, need getting used to.

I've been wondering how the Israelites felt at the beginning and end of those forty years of wandering in the desert.  Exodus records how, at the beginning, there were many voices of protest that, in essence, 'we never suffered like this in Egypt'.  But, when Joshua finally led the people over the Jordan, the new freedoms brought their own problems.  What had become a familiar way of living in the desert had to give way to another new life pattern in the Promised Land.  It was all very strange for them, with other tribes to conquer, rival religions to extinguish ... or in many cases embrace, to the anger of God!  

Whatever coming out of lock-down might mean for us as individuals, it will all be very strange after so long a time of restriction.  As the conditions that imprison us are removed, one thing is important.  We can depend on the continuing presence of the Lord as we return to the wider world.  He has promised to be with us, as the psalmist reminds us, "When hard pressed, I cried to the Lord; he brought me into a spacious place. The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?" (Psalm 118:5-6).