Anxiously Waiting

It is Halloween night.  In the darkness of this night, no spook is more frightening than our reality right now.  The coronavirus cases are spiking in the United States and around the world.  Hospitals are nearly at capacity and may be forced to make hard choices to deny care to some people.  Our election is in just three days.  There have been threats of violence at the polls and after the election.  It may take a while to declare a winner in the presidential election.  Racial violence continues.  To make matters worse, there have been multiple natural disasters.  2020 has been the year from hell.

The anxiety is palpable.  I hear it in the voices on the phone.  I see it in Facebook posts.  I detect it in my own restlessness.  I led an online interfaith conversation this week and asked them “How is it with your soul?”  There was silence at first and it took some coaxing to get people to share.  They are struggling.  Some said they know God has a plan, but. . . One woman talked about what it’s like to be brown and Muslim.  There was joy in our ability to talk to each other, to see each other’s faces.  I have found it unusually difficult to get people to answer emails, text messages, and phone calls.  Some people seem to be shutting down to a certain extent.  In a team I lead, I finally got three women to answer my question.  They want to wait to plan a program, wait until after the election, wait until January.  They are feeling too much anxiety.

I get this.  I am anxious too.  Like everybody else, I want to get past the election.  I understand that this is probably the most important election in my lifetime.  It is the choice between democracy and authoritarianism.  Joe Biden is well ahead in the polls. . . but we remember the shock of 2016.  I don’t think this country can survive another four years of Trump.  Like so many others, I am worried about what comes next.  And so we anxiously wait.