I don’t watch network news very often. It’s not that I don’t care about what’s going on in the world.  It’s just that my TV time is limited, and I’d rather watch things that I enjoy.  Last night, in between my TV time and when I relinquished the remote to my children, I caught  just a few seconds of a local news report.  It said the county was looking to hire “contact tracers” to try and limit the spread of the coronavirus.

The job would entail talking to infected persons and finding out where they had been and who they had been in physical contact with, so that those people could be told that they were exposed to the virus.  The concept intrigued me.  First, I have  a difficult time believing the county is not already doing this.  I live in a county where the death rate for confirmed cases is nearly ten percent.  (That’s frightening in itself.) A large number of those cases can be attributed to a nursing home in the area.  Another percentage can be traced back to a couple of church events held in the area.  Contact tracing is definitely already being done, or we might not have been able to identify those two hotspots.  Imagine, just visiting the sick and shut in, or attending a church conference changing your life forever.

But isn’t that the way it should be? Shouldn’t every encounter be life affirming, if not life changing? Shouldn’t our impact be larger than we expect?  Jesus performed miracles in specific places, and for specific people.  But those weren’t the only people affected. Thousands of years later we’re still talking about it.  We should each do a little contact tracing of our own.  Where have we been?  Who have we been in direct contact with?  What are we carrying and exposing to others?

These are just a few things to think about as we prepare to go back into the world.  Let this period of isolation also be one of reflection.

if your works were to speak for you, what would they be saying?

Mama Radford

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