During the COVID-19 lockdown, what did you want back? What did you not want back?

Forty days into the lockdown, that’s the question I posed to people in my circles—Facebook friends, church members, students. Someday it will be interesting to look back on this period and see where our minds and hearts were—and whether our lives truly changed.

What We Wanted Back

• Hugs
• The laughter and joy of families together
• Church together
• Potlucks
• Taking my kids to the library without fear
• Singing with others
• Family closeness
• Friends in my home
• Sports
• Eating out
• My hairstylist
• Freedom to travel
• The innocence of movement
• My classroom of students
• Playing Uno with friends
• Refills

What We Didn’t Want Back

Someday it will be interesting to look back on this period and see where our minds and hearts were.

• The rat race
• Traffic
• Alarms
• Having to work in an office
• Ministry without innovative media
• My uprooted areas of spiritual negligence
• Program-based stress-filled ministry
• A calendar packed with appointments
• Time away from our newborn son
• Easy access to gambling
• Pollution
• Endless bickering between media and friends about how to handle the crisis
• Wearing shoes

So that’s how we felt after 40 days, just as some lockdown restrictions were being eased. How much will these 40 days change us? Will more people keep working from home? Will people remember “how isolation has brought community within my community”? Will we reembrace the “the ability to show up for people,” as one busy mom wrote, without “not having the time to show up for people”?

For me as a pastor, the lockdown has opened my eyes to the repeated longings of another pastor: “God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:8).

Then in a wistful moment I realized: Is this how Christ feels about us all the time?

Andy Nash ([email protected]) is a pastor in Denver, Colorado. He leads a study tour to Israel each summer. He wants it back next summer.