More aspects of a new normal

About a week ago, a thought crept into my increasingly foggy head. I said to Tress I thought about teeing up an online drinks and chat time with some friends. She thought it’d be good, so I set up a group and teed up that time.

Last Friday night, we all dialed in with drinks in hand. Some even dressed up for the occasion (the Hippos, of course). The initial 45-minute limit went by pretty quickly and when I asked if people wanted to push on, everyone readily said yes, so a couple of minutes before the time was up, I teed up another link and we continued there. I guess we all needed some contact time to sort of calibrate and stay sane. It was a good, albeit different, sort of Friday night catch up. When we all signed off, we said we’d do it again next week.

On Saturday, we slept in and I then did some cleaning around the house. The usual vacuuming was followed by wipe downs, including a good wipe of the cook top range hood and some cutlery drawers. With us both being at home so much, I’m noticing more things that needed cleaning or just a touch up. It gets exhausting that way too.

When I had enough cleaning, I got cleaned up myself and then went out to get lunch. We can no longer go out together, so I had to go out by myself. It was the same with the shopping later on. The much talked about “new normal” has started to get to me – the being alone, no contact, mask, no seats, etc., etc. It gets annoying and tiring. It really takes some getting used to.

For no particular reason, we had started watching, earlier last week, a Korean drama on Netflix. It was just me “surfing” around to find something to watch (after “Unorthodox”) and I thought a classical/historical type drama with sword fights would be just the type of escapism I needed. “Kingdom” turned out to be something different – it’s another zombie like offering. It’s done in English with mismatched subtitles, but the plot was simple so there is little need to actually follow what was being said on screen. I guess it’s a mindless escapade of sorts. It turned out that the homies on the Friday night online drinkies were all into Korean drama. Maybe some stars are aligned. Anyway, that’s what we did again on Saturday night, as I toggled between the football and endless chasing around by zombies.

Sunday saw us doing the usual St Alf’s online service. Peter spoke about how a good God can allow something like the current pandemic to happen. The old chestnut of how a good God can allow evil to persist I guess. A gem which Peter shared was from the book John Lennox wrote regarding the present virus plagued world. Lennox cited work done by Peter Pollard, a scientist from Griffith University in Queensland. Pollard pointed out that a vast majority of viruses (99.9%) are good. Only a tiny bit is bad. This tiny bit however, can wreak great havoc, like a tiny bird getting sucked into a jet engine to bring down a jumbo jetliner. It makes the world God created, which He said was good, feels like an awful place. This world is a fallen, broken realm. God however, has it all worked out from day 1, and the new heaven and new earth will be presented in its full glory, at the right time.

I guess that is what always gives us hope – that one day, there will be no more suffering, no more death. It still needs work however, for that hope to underpin all we do each day. Like when I need to keep my head down today to get all the work done…