by Rev. Melinda Giese
After a disrupted and chaotic end to the 2019/2020 school year and an online and hybrid year for 2020/2021, children and youth are headed back to school again. This year, some aspects felt refreshingly normal – Anna and I went to Fife High School in-person to pay back-to-school fees. We made the annual trip to Target to buy school supplies. We’ve shopped for a few things Jonathan will need at college and plan to move him into his dorm at the University of Washington in mid-September.
But this back-to-school season also reminds me that we’re not going back to the old normal but moving ever so slowly towards a new normal. Along with new jeans, we also needed to buy new masks for both kids. When Anna rides the bus to school, all the windows will stay open for increased ventilation. And added to the usual back to school nerves are parental concerns for the health of unvaccinated children as they return to in-person classes during yet another Covid surge.
At this point in our pandemic experience, I keep thinking of the Israelites who spent 40 years in the wilderness on their way to the promised land. While I am sure the end of Covid will not take 40 years, it feels like we’ve been dealing with this pandemic for a very long time. And as the Delta variant continues, our hope that we were coming to the end of the pandemic has been replaced with the recognition that we are still in the middle of it. Like the Israelites, we’re stuck in a strange place where we cannot go back, but we also cannot see the end.
In William Bridges’ book, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, he calls this stage of a transition “the neutral zone.” Something has ended but a new beginning has not yet arrived. This middle stage happens in every kind of transition, both the changes we choose (leaving slavery in Egypt) as well as those that happen to us (global pandemics). In both cases, the neutral zone feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar, like the wilderness.
Even though we tend to want to get out of the neutral zone as fast as possible, William Bridges writes, “the neutral zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to the next.”
This is also a time when the God who makes all things new is particularly present. In the strangeness of this time that makes us ask new questions, we believe God is here. In our realizations of what we miss (and don’t miss) about our pre-Covid lives, we trust that God is guiding us. In our frustration as well as the times we feel at peace, we know God walks alongside us. And day by day, God journeys with us through this transition into a new beginning.