Back when I was a kid in Havertown, Pennsylvania, I’d hear my parents and grandparents talk of the deprivations they endured during the Great Depression and World War II. My aunt Cass Gallagher talked about the Great Irish Famine with such ferocity that it was as if she had lived it herself instead of her great-grandparents. All of them said they faced these prolonged historic hardships with hope, determination and their faith.
When I came up to the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts in mid-March from New York City to join my wife, Julee, and our golden retriever, Gracie, to ride out the pandemic in our vacation cabin, I thought it would be for a month. “We’ll just buy a bunch of groceries and hunker down,” I said. “It’ll be spring before we know it.”
The reality has been much harder. We are in the grip of a crisis unlike anything in our lifetimes. People are dying of a virus that is not going away in a month, or even a year. In fact, we don’t know when things are going to get better, but we are told that when they do, they won’t be the same. When I left Manhattan on March 18, I had no idea that I would never return again to the same city, the city I love and call my home. It will be different in ways I can’t imagine.
For Guideposts editors this time apart has been hard, even though we are still working remotely on our books, magazines and websites. A lot of us have processed our feelings by writing about them in the form of devotions. We thought we’d share these with you in a free eBook called Moments of Grace: 17 Hope-filled Devotions to Help You Through the Covid-19 Pandemic. We share glimpses into our own lives during the crisis that we are all going through together. You can read an excerpt here. And you may also want to check out our new Someone Cares initiative, resources for weathering the Coronavirus crisis.
Listening to my elders back in Havertown recount their struggles in hard times, times that seemed so remote and unknowable to me, I could sense a touch of pride, even nostalgia, in the telling, as if what they remembered most clearly was the love and the faith that saw them through. I know that these times we live in now may someday be seen as our hard times. I believe we will look back on them with the same embrace of the love and faith that got us through.
