I get on a soapbox about staying home and washing your hands. I’m not a paranoid person. I’m not a “high risk” person based on my health to contract Covid-19. It may seem like I’m just following the crowd. Or perhaps it seems like I’m looking to make an issue. I’m not. Let me tell you a story.
Yesterday, my husband spent the day with our girls. Their task for the day was cleaning the house. So they spent the day cleaning sinks, taking out trash, sweeping floors, the usual clean the house type of things. This isn’t especially special, my husband is by far better at housekeeping than I am. He does it without being asked and without complaint.
After dinner last night, I got a phone call from the person doing an appraisal on our home. She wanted to come today (wearing a Hazmat mask for everyone’s protection). Now on the surface, our home was clean, but if you’ve ever had your home appraised or tried to sell your house, you know that there’s clean and then there’s “show your house clean.” Our house was just clean when that call came in. My husband started hanging pictures with me (that I’d taken down and never re-hung two weeks before) at 9:30 p.m. The girls pitched in and organized. By bedtime (a late bedtime) the house was closer to “show ready.”
What does this have to do with my constant request for you to stay home during this pandemic? Everything. It has everything to do with it. Why? Because this man that pitched in to calm my quickly spiraling “how are we ever going to get this done?” mind, shows up like that every single day. He’s the calm to my storm. He’s behind the scenes making things work that I never even worry about because he’s got it covered.
What you may or may not know is that last year, I prayed hard for this man. Some of the hardest prayers I’ve ever prayed. Not because he wasn’t in my life, he was. Not because we were going through a tough spot in our marriage, we weren’t. I prayed hard to calm my heart, to calm my fears of the thought of losing him to the wildcard that had been thrown our way: cancer. I sit here less than a year removed from the fear of losing him to something I had no control over. By the grace of God, he beat it as I so desperately prayed he would.
I’m under no illusion that I have control over anything in the realm of protecting him or my children from harm. I know that I don’t. I trust God daily to cover them and protect them. However, that doesn’t mean that I won’t do all that I can to insure that they are safe. You see, you may think that you have to be at work because you’re important. Perhaps you are. But I’m here to tell you that if you even remotely show signs of sickness, you’re not that important. Your job isn’t worth risking someone else’s life. Because truth be told, you, just like all of us, are replaceable in our jobs. What’s not replaceable is a human life that you are choosing to risk when you think you are somehow more important than the guidelines that have been put into place to protect us.
My pleas and requests for you to stay at home are very much so self-serving, but not only for me, but for the people you care about too. I prayed for this man many, many times over the years. I’ve prayed for his health. I’ve prayed for our children’s health. I cannot, cannot bear the thought of their health being jeopardized because you think that you don’t need to follow the simple measures that are in place to protect them.
Slow the spread. Do your part. For the love, wash your hands and stay home. To you, he’s just another man. To me and the beautiful girls he’s with, he’s our world. He’s not the only man (or woman) in the world that someone’s praying for and wanting to protect; you’ve probably got one like him. If you don’t do it for you, do it for them. Let’s protect one another. For this short while, we can all make a difference by doing such simple things.
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