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The July sun peeks through the clouds on a Thursday afternoon over Haw Creek Commons. While no one is physically present for this photo, there are many represented here. 

A children's playground is wrapped in caution tape, with the swings unstrung and absent from the frame, reminding that the pandemic has closed such structures until further notice. 

A graveyard stands in silent storytelling, holding memory of members of the Church community. 

A construction crew in the distance builds for the future, nearby the local elementary school. 

A pathway wanders through the stillness, previously providing a current from the parking lot to the school for parents to pick up their children. 

Currently and not pictured, children's camps maintain masks and distance while they learn about the wilderness, gardening, blacksmithing, and their parents get some summer childcare.

As we distance socially and protect each other in health and body, what does it mean to not sacrifice community? Community isn't merely the coming together for a laugh and shared interest. Community allows a space to craft our identity, find our roles, meet needs, understand our story, learn the stories of others, offer our gifts, encounter the gifts of others, share passions, combat loneliness, have and offer support in challenging seasons, hold space for grief and transition, advocate for justice, equity, and mutuality, widen the table for diverse representation, and learn together how we can improve and progress as a society. Community allows us to know one another and be known, to understand how we can care for each other, and to ensure that no one is forgotten or slips through the cracks. 

COVID-19 not only threatens our individual and immunity health, it has changed and game in the ways we gather. In this season, however long the COVID-19 pandemic season lasts, we find ourselves charting and navigating roads yet uncharted, holding many threads and priorities in tension to arrive at the 'best' way forward (or sometimes it seems our best option is only 'the better bad'), and feeling fear, anxiety, frustration, weariness, confusion, and exasperation in the process. To endeavor at all to create community is a challenge in itself; to keep trying amidst a global pandemic and this season is commendable and courageous. 

While this picture depicts a scene that feels barren, the environment is ripe with possibility, new pathways, and the stories of people. It will not look like it has. This can be a beautiful reality: reminder that, for the lives of the oppressed in the 'normal' before this, the place to which the economy and social standards relegated them was subpar and unacceptable. 

Even this barren picture offers many voices whose insight may help us find our path forward. 

What can we learn from those who have come and gone before us, the whispers from the graveyards to offer insight to our present circumstances? 

What can we learn from the children and the virtue of play, how to steward a society that still cares for the wholeness of our littles? 

What can we learn about equity and gaps in our structures, needs that need tending, assets yet untapped and need connecting? 

What can be torn down that no longer serves the wider good? (A few things that come to my mind: systems of oppression, police brutality, and systemic inequality that differs for whiteness and blackness, heteronormativity and queer identities. Systems that make it nearly impossible right not to be a parent who works. Healthcare tied to employment. Economic policy at the expense of some people's lives. Profit being made off suppressing and incarcerating demographics and generations.) 

What can we build in this season, even in the midst of the foggy road ahead, preparing space for all to have a place? 

Whose story can we hear anew? Whose stories share the space and can offer us a perspective that allows ours to widen? 

While this season is rife with anxiety, I consider it a gift that the way forward cannot look like it has. We are capable of emerging on the other side with a more equitable, diverse, and abundant model of society, community, and interconnectedness, free of privilege, fragility, and oppression. 

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