Suddenly, hope

A good message from The Economist

Messaging and perspective in the midst of a pandemic…

Ada was just three years old when she started to ask about death. My parent’s dog, Mazoo, was dying.

“Is Mazoo going to die…am I going to die?”

“Yes, everyone is going to die someday,” I replied. My desire was to ease her, honestly, into the reality of death.

A week later, we were talking about the coming weekend and our plans.

“What are we going to do on Sunday?” Ada repeated with mounting intensity and anxiety.

I told her our plans: church, lunch, maybe a nap. But she just kept pressing, what would happen afterwards on SUNDAY?!?!?

It was then that I realized: I told her that everyone would die “someday” and what she heard was that everyone would die “Sunday”.

Can you imagine the terror, the powerlessness, of thinking that the whole world was ending on Sunday?

November 2020 is hard…and there are harder days to come with winter and COVID and deep societal divides. But let us also embrace hope as we talk, as we plan, and as we dream.

The world is not ending “on Sunday”.