Time and its relativity: why we need Holy Week during a pandemic (part 2)

Every day I wake up, and most nights before I fall asleep, I need to remind myself what day it is and what day it will be. During this pandemic, time is mostly unfamiliar to me. Every day both feels the exact same and like no day I’ve ever experienced before — I am simultaneously in some kind of strange future and also stuck in a present circumstance I cannot escape. It seems like two years since I last preached in front of a congregation, but it was only a month ago…

This is probably connected to the fact that I’m staying at home with my five month old son while my wife works in the hospital, so many of my days are repetitive due to an infant’s schedule. But I’m also working full-time on top of this and have been running in a thousand different directions. Maybe it is the diversity of the work overlaid on top of such monotony, or maybe it’s the neverending-ness of this shelter in place order, but I am never exactly sure what day it is. Are you?

Funny how it has taken such dramatic circumstances to understand something so foundational to our understanding of reality: time, we know, is relative. It is right now that we are actually feeling the relativity of time in such jarring fashion. We’ve experienced this before as we have waited for the school bell to ring, sat in traffic, or while we spent…