It’s on this Easter Sunday, Resurrection Day as some may call it who follow Jesus Christ, myself being one of them that I sit and reflect on our current health crisis, coronaviris, COVID-19 epidemic, and attempt to reveal that which lies under the surface of a thick skin as some may call strength, courage, or even perseverance of a difficult life, a broken child who’s broken body saw the other side of death, to see the light of day once again.
To experience a moment such as this with the rest of the world, we all are sitting in the same ocean of revelry and we drift between thoughts of what is more important, our health, or our handbook, our hearts or our healing, our hope or our helping others.
Some of us sit in silence awaiting a miracle in the hospital as healthcare workers put their own lives on the line to see us through. Some of us sit alone in a home once filled with laughs, constant conversation, and controlled chaos as our kids have moved on, moved out, or friends and family, unfortunately forced to keep out.
I’ve sat here, for who knows how long, days have turned into weeks, attempting to understand the deeper reason, the revealing lesson for the whole world to see and although some things more obvious, some things still are left to be revealed.
In the darkness when I died that day at age 18, I saw a life I took forgranted, I saw people I hurt, people I took advantage of and it broke me. It broke any good within me, any empathy left intact, and compassion furloughed. “Never again”, I said, after God found me in the darkness to show me there was a purpose for my pain, a path to follow that was outside of my own needs or wants, and a love that could be found from helping others. I do not fear death as I did that day, a forced reckoning of the person I was who had a love for humanity that I rejected because I myself had been rejected and cast aside, used and abused as another item of the consumerists we Americans had become.
Today, I ask us all humanity, not just Americans, Italians, Chinese, or Canadians, not just Christians, Islam, Atheists, Spiritualists, and Buddist…for the love of whatever God you serve, even if that be yourself…
Stand true to the humanity within. Stand true to the kingdoms that rise and fall and yet what will always remain-ourselves dealing our own hearts from within and that which only lightens the load- each other.
We need each other.
We need hope. We need letters, texts, emails, calls of encouragement. When the gates of freedom open again for the world imprisoned by a health crisis to save humanity itself, let us embrace the realization that we cannot do this alone and embrace each other. For the love of God, Hug each other. Hug as long as you can before breaking free, resist the feeling to break the embrace as you remember today.
Today, let us remember love.