32 Degrees, 25 mph Winds, and a Virus Loose on the Streets

I get up to coffee and headlines.  As put, that is normal for me, but of course the headlines are not normal; they are numbers of infections, numbers of deaths, and two dozen stories all related to those two numbers with hardly a word about anything else.  Both the national feed and the local dwell on these, almost exclusively.  The weather is perhaps the only news item which makes practically no connections to the numbers.

Babies had me up at 4am.  I went to the kitchen to prepare a bottle of formula, and I could hear the wind howling and the chimes on the porch chiming, and I feel COMPLETELY ALONE in this, but I immediately thought about my street friends.

This will be headlines in two hours, but for them it has been daily life for the last two hours.

I am not there with them to know first hand, but I have walked a mile in those shoes in years past, and so I can imagine.

Here is what I imagine:

I see a bum in a tent.  Not all bums have them, but a few do on any given night in Lubbock.  I see a tent made to sleep 2 or 3 people with one bum in it when at around 2am the cold front begins making life miserable as the rest of Lubbock sleeps.  It is cold in the tent too, but it provides wind protection, and so a bum with a particularly warm sleeping bag strikes a bargain with the bum in the tent.  If they share with each other, they can be warm.  Then I imagine another bum with half a bottle of booze overhearing this conversation and so bargains to share and get in to the tent, but he brings his girlfriend with him.

One of these bums has coronavirus infection as 4 of them settle into the cramped space.  Without their social compactness, they might die.  Without their social distance WE might.

Turns out bum health is OUR health.

 

Just at a very selfish level, it behooves us to consider OTHERS.  How much more is this the business of Jesus who is selfless and calls us to be selfless too?

 

But it’s just my imagination.

Right.